Revenant
by mirroredsakura
Summary: SephxCloudxZackxAeris. Just because I'm dead doesn't mean I'm gone. Cloud and Seph... they're breaking inside. Aeris can't help them, can't fix them like they need to be fixed. So that's what I'm here for. I'm not going to let them down. Not this time.
1. Prologue: Dead Man's Oath

**Title:** Revenant (previously known only as "The Zackfic")  
**Author:** **mirroredsakura**  
**Fandom:** FFVII  
**Rating:** PG-13  
**Warnings:** Boys who like other boys. Extended canon deviation. Non-explicit sexual situations. The works.

**Summary:** Just because I'm gone doesn't mean I'm just going to let go. I won't. Not when they still need me. Not ever.

**Disclaimers:** I had a dream where I had these three boys with me. It was a grand and glorious dream. It was also ten years too late to claim rights over them. You know the feeling.

**Notes:** I haven't played Crisis Core. This was originally written in November of last year for Nanowrimo when the release of which was a distant whisper of a possibility (...or it could have been more than that. Frankly, memory doesn't stretch much further than "PANICPANICTYPETYPETYPE") and since then trailers have popped up everywhere depicting the first meetings of all the characters which are different from in this fic. Since they play rather integral part in story, we'll say it is canon-deviating and leave it at that. The most I might take out of CC is Zack's last name, and even that I might not even have to use. :)

**Prologue: Dead Man's Oath**

*

Always kinda knew it wouldn't last.

Most things don't, y'know? I knew it then just about as well as any other man. Been around the block a couple of times—don't got a lot of block where I come from after all, it's a pretty small town, Gongaga—and done some things I'm not proud of… gotten beaten over the head with a quarterstaff for most of 'em too.

Yeah, I know how stuff like that works. Or, like in our case, doesn't.

Thing was, I didn't want it to. End, I mean. And I tried so hard to believe—tried to make them all believe—that it could work, that it could last forever, and that I would always be there for him.

You know. That they'd always be there for me.

Yeah. They. There was more than just two of us. Or even three of us. Having four of us kinda evened it out a little in numbers, but we stopped counting early on in the game and focused on caring. It was more than a relationship, you know? It was like a family, the kind Aeris and I have always kind of wanted—you know, the hokey kind with lots of laughing and tripping over each other's feet, and lots and lots of naughty touches in cramped spaces—and what I think the others have always kind of needed.

We worked together—we _fit_—like some great, fucked up jigsaw puzzle jammed together to make something great, some awesome whole that everyone else could see but ourselves, who only really saw the greatness of each other.

Well, we were a weird bunch from the beginning—three Shinra goons and a flower girl the Turks were so desperate to reclaim? No one would've staked their bets on us getting old and retiring together, I'm sure. Certainly not on us four shacking up in some nice old house on the outskirts of Gongaga, as far the hell away from Midgar as we can get without setting up camp inside the Northern Crater, with a white picket fence and a flock of baby chocobo chicks flocking around at our feet. Heh, Spike would've loved them, and there would be Aeris with her cake, and maybe Seph would even learn to relax out on the front porch, crack a smile once in a while if we were _really_ lucky…

Yeah, it was a nice dream at a time where it didn't seem like a bad thing to want things, you know? That it wasn't a crime to be happy.

Heh.

SOLDIERs don't retire, not really. I just figured that… well, with an ambitious little leech like Shinra slopping its mako-sucking tentacles over every continent it came to, there had to come a time when it'd conquered everything, right? When everyone everywhere was under President Shinra's fat, piggish little thumb and all nicely written out in lists of assets and wealth and the concessions that every other country in the world was handing over to the great power conglomerate. It was a grim vision of the future, but then all that shit getting to it would have been _over_.

Still… I guess even if it _had_ turned out like that… if Shinra had been the one to take over the world, and sucked out the Lifestream until the whole Planet fused into one gigantic ball of glass, he would've needed his precious little SOLDIER toys to keep the peace.

No rest for the weary, I guess. There're always gonna to be soldiers. And there's no soldier alive that'll ever match Seph, so I guess retirement's never been an option for him.

Or at least… I used to _think_ retirement's never been an option for him. The alternative…

Well. Finding out otherwise… finding out what _happens_… how the whole world goes to hell, and how stuff's happened that can never be fixed…

Hits you hard, I'm telling you. Makes you think _I could've fixed this._

But I think what comes after is worse. Knowing you couldn't, knowing you can't do more. It hurt enough to fail Seph once. It hurts more to know I failed them all in the end.

So I'm not going to let that happen again.

*

Finally posted! Near a year in the writing, passed around more than the common cold because of my terrible need to have it thoroughly canon-, character-, and otherwise-beta'd. Since it was originally a Nanofic, that means it was a terrible mass of hastily-constructed flimsy plot. It's taken this long to rip it apart and put it back together. We'll see how it goes! ^_^


	2. Chapter 01: This Is How It Was

**Title:** Revenant (previously known only as "The Zackfic")  
**Author:** **mirroredsakura**  
**Fandom:** FFVII  
**Rating:** PG-13  
**Warnings:** Boys who like other boys. Extended canon deviation. Non-explicit sexual situations. The works.

**Summary:** This is what it means to make it into SOLDIER 1st Class. This is how much you give up. This is how much you gain.

**Disclaimers:** I had a dream where I had these three boys with me. It was a grand and glorious dream. It was also ten years too late to claim rights over them. You know the feeling.

**Previous Chapters:**  
Prologue: Dead Man's Oath

**Notes:** As stated before, I have not played Crisis Core. Basing all knowledge on what was given in the original game to DoC, I based my story on dates and facts given. There wasn't any information on Zack's childhood ever so I made up my own. ^_^

**Chapter One: This Is How It Was**

*

_Flip, fumble, fall, back into what was_

*

"Are you lost?"

Zack turned at that, slinging his duffel over one shoulder as he did so. _Finally,_ he thought. Guide had taken over an _hour_ to show up. Sure wasn't looking for a big tip, not if Zack had anything to say about it.

That is... if you tipped Shinra-paid guides. He might've found the idea of a tip offensive... you never knew with these city folk.

But the moment he turned, Zack knew immediately that the thin wisp of a girl couldn't be the guide Shinra had sent out. _Had_ to send out, since hed been told that _under no circumstances_ was he to try getting to the Shinra building on his own. Locals weren't all that friendly, or something like that. Well, he'd taken a good look around himself when he'd first walked through the gates and taken in the sight of the bottom of the Plate looking like a dumping ground for the sick and dying. Zack supposed he couldn't really blame the locals for being angry...

Weird though, that he was the only one. You'd think with all that talk about Wutai, there'd be more guys like him falling head over heels lining up to try and make it into SOLDIER.

"Nah... thanks doll, but I don't think you're the one who's gonna take me to Shinra?"

She blinked. The girl was all eyes... huge and green in her thin face, beneath a mop of long brown hair scraped off her face into a single tail that hung down her back. Her turquoise dress was tight around the shoulders and her skirt looked shorter on her than it was supposed to, making her long, thin legs look even longer and thinner than they probably were. Quickly giving a furtive look around her, she stepped closer, waving a hand at his face and made a shushing noise at him.

He didn't like that very much—no fourteen-year-old wanted to be shushed, especially if they were someday going to be in Shinra and SOLDIER and fighting the bad guys over in Wutai like all the heroes hed ever heard about. And _especially_ not by some girl who was probably even younger than he was.

But she was tugging on his arm, and starting to walk, trying to pull him after her. "The guides been and gone a little more than an hour ago... it'll be another hour before anyone else comes down looking for you. Come on, I'll show you something."

Zack had heard the obligatory and somewhat half-hearted lesson of "don't listen to strangers!" from his parents before, like any kid. But he was from Gongaga, and there wasn't a whole lot of town around Gongaga to find strangers lurking around. Well… there was the reactor, and the soldiers that came by once in awhile to check up on it, but everyone went to go see them looking for news so that it didn't really require taking the lesson to heart. Now monsters, _monsters_ there were plenty of warnings and rules about. Marconi had even been given the condensed version in book form. The thing had been about as big as a dictionary and almost twice as thick.

Not like Zack ever really listened to the rules. He'd bagged his first Beach Plug—yeah, that still sounded wrong to him too—when he was twelve, and probably would've lost a finger in that particular venture if Ellie hadn't snitched a Restore materia from her father earlier that day to use on him. And as for strangers… well, the guys that visited the old reactor once in a while all had great stories to tell and hell if Zack wasn't one to go and listen to 'em all. And now that he was here, he was going right for the top. There'd be plenty of awesome stories for _him_ to tell once he visited home, no question about _that_.

"I'll show you my secret place," she told him, smiling brightly and ignoring the considering look on his face, "and you're not allowed to tell anyone else about it! Not allowed to go running to mean old Mister Shinra up on the Plate!"

And _that_ was a draw no fourteen-year-old boy could resist. Going against the rules _and_ finding out cool secrets that the big boss man didn't know about? Hell yeah he was _so_ there.

He was only a little disappointed at first when he found out her 'secret place' was a ratty old broken-down church. Who liked going to church, anyway? Zack had always been of the opinion that it was _boring_ sitting around on a hard wooden bench and not being allowed to even kick your legs up onto the pew in front of you and lean back while the old man at the front kept on _talking_. It was never about anything interesting either. Zack had long decided that if he ever became a priest, _he'd_ talk about interesting things like how he kicked ass in Wutai. Well, if he'd be able to do it without getting his ass kicked by his old man.

Not that he wanted to be a priest. His mom always said priests had to be _serious_ and weren't allowed to laugh or have fun or talk to girls because then the gods would get mad and turn you into a pillar of salt. Heh. Well he weren't _stupid,_ he knew there was more to that, the whole thing about vows and no sex and so on, but his mom always did like babying him, and blushed redder than a tomato whenever she overheard anything remotely obscene. Zack had figured it was harmless to humor her and had left it like that.

The inside of the church was cool though.

A lot of stuff was broken, like the floor and parts of the ceiling, and the pews were dull and looked older than they probably were, as if someone had taken the time to scrape all the polish off, got lazy about halfway, went out for lunch, and left it like that forever. But the holes in the ceiling weren't all that bad… somehow sunlight managed to filter down through the Plate and through those holes, the largest sunbeams centered directly into a patch of broken flooring. And Zack didn't need to be in SOLDIER yet to be able to be able to smell the scent of the tawny and gold flowers that grew through it.

It was also all quiet inside. Well, almost all quiet. There were obviously the muffled sounds from the outside, and all the people yelling out there, with all their crazy cars and machines and noise everywhere. It might've been a lot for any other country boy to handle, but he was Zack and Zack was never afraid of little stuff like that. After all, city folk didn't have _quite_ the kinds of monsters that roamed around Gongaga, especially near the Reactor, so there was obviously no question as to how much more he could handle. Well, in his personal estimation anyway. He'd worry about what other people thought when he started moving up the ranks. A little city hustle and bustle wasn't going to bother him!

But there was also music. Soft music, like stuff he couldn't hear with his _ears_ but more like it was in his _head _even though that didn't really make a lot of sense. It didn't sound like instruments, not like the kind of stuff he heard back home, that the funny old man next door played and refused to let him touch. But it wasn't just voices either. And it wasn't as if there were _words_ in there. Or maybe there were, but it certainly wasn't stuff he could understand. It was like the music and the voices both _were_ the instruments and _weren't_ at the same time… which was weird and probably wasn't possible and besides, why was there music playing, anyway? Who would play music so soft it was like a whisper in the back of your head, especially if there was nobody here to hear it?

"Can you hear it too?"

The girl was smiling, as if it was such a special secret. And it was funny when she did that because she looked like she could glow, and her eyes went all warm and Zack thought she looked almost… pretty. And not silly and boring like a lot of the other girls back home.

"Yeah. What is it? It's so quiet…"

She watched him silently for a moment as if digesting this bit of information. "It's really loud to me," she told him, "It's like a big concert in my head all the time when I'm in here. They're quieter outside, but they're still always there."

Zack couldn't decide whether or not this sounded like much fun. It _might_ be like having friends around, and friends were real nice company to have… but he wasn't quite sure he'd want them in his head all the time. That might mean they'd know what he was thinking and he didn't like the idea of other people he couldn't see knowing _everything_ about him.

"Are they… nice?" he ventured.

She shrugged with a little smile, "Usually. They tell me things sometimes. But… _you_ know. All talking together and singing and just _there… _so most of the time it's hard to make sense of it all. It's quieter outside the church though, just a little hum in the back of my head."

As if she'd suddenly remembered, she poked him in the chest, "Don't be talking so loudly about having anything to do with Shinra down here, you know." She told him, shaking her finger at him like his mother did when she was working herself up to a good scolding. "The war's gotten people pretty focused on the bad guys outside instead of the ones sitting on top of them, but it's still not a good idea. People don't forget bad things easily, and you could meet someone real bad people down here who hate Shinra. They're not very hard to find."

That was probably why they needed a guide up the Plate, even though he'd been forewarned that the lower Sectors were a maze of rough crowds and shady establishments too.

But Zack was fourteen and so Zack was invincible. It sounded exciting. "Nah, they wouldn't be able to hurt me, I can run pretty damned fast!" And he could too. Second fastest kid in the town, although Zack thought that was pretty unfair since the fastest kid in the town had kicked him in the shin during the last legs of that race and had thereafter professed to be busy whenever Zack demanded a rematch.

"Bet I can beat you!" the girl replied grinning, "I've gotten really good at running away from the bad guys."

"I don't race girls!"

…Well he _didn't_. Girls never did want to race, except that one girl Ellie who could beat up any boy in town, but _she_ was just like one of the guys and so Zack didn't think Ellie counted. And besides, this strange city girl didn't look a _thing_ like Ellie.

She hit him with a stick and _tsk tsk tsk_ed him for that. Zack had no idea where the stick had come from, so he didn't dare complain and settled for simply staring slack-jawed. Maybe she _was_ like Ellie after all, and Zack didn't really want to get beat up on his first day at Midgar. The whole injuring his pride thing and all…

"Scaredy cat," she told him cheerfully afterwards, plopping down next to him in the patch of sunlight near the flowers and stretching out her hands to touch the silky petals while she spoke. "You're going to have to be nicer than that you know, or else you're never going to get a girlfriend!"

At fourteen that could be about the most horrible thing that could happen to a boy. Zack played it cool though, and was immensely proud of himself for how well-played that was. "So you're gonna teach me?"

Keep it smooth.

"I'm going to have to," she replied, with that sunny smile again, "you're not going to come visit me if I don't!"

They talked like that, two kids in a church with hardly _anything_ in common though that didn't seem to matter 'cause they kept on talking until Zack realized he didn't even know her name.

She hesitated when he asked her. But only for a moment.

"Aeris," she said, "Aeris Gainsborough." She then sat up straighter, waving a hand at him. "But shhhh, you're not allowed to tell anybody," she told him sternly, "Otherwise I'm going to have to run away and then you'll never see me again!"

He didn't like the sound of that. "Not anybody?" he asked, frowning. He liked this funny girl with the green eyes, why wasn't he allowed to tell anyone about his new friend from the slums? It was exciting after all; this city girl was worlds away from the girls he'd known all his life back home.

She laughed at the look on his face; a little half-pout that wouldn't let her be entirely sure was because of true disappointment, or just to help him nudge her into reconsidering. Zack wasn't quite sure himself, so it was better to keep things vague, right? Either way, it certainly seemed to work, because she batted at him and started to laugh, "Okay, okay… then you can only tell the people most important to you. No bad guys!"

"How will I know which are the bad guys?" It seemed like a reasonable question to ask. If he were going to play this game, it would be a good thing to know the rules. Zack was a fair guy, he wasn't about to break one he hadn't known about and it was always a good idea to play by the rules. Even if you had to bend them a little sometimes.

"When they come to catch me," she replied. "So you've got to be careful!"

Zack figured he could work with that. Especially when he got into SOLDIER and could kick anyone's ass who tried to hurt his friend.

She bounced to her feet, "The guide's going to be coming soon… we'd better get you back before he leaves again."

She took him as far as the corner, stopping as soon as she caught sight of the rusty-red uniform the leader was wearing at the head of the blue-clad troops accompanying him. There were a bunch of other boys Zack's age, milling around in a tight little group as the folks around them shot ugly looks at the soldiers. No, this wouldn't be a good place to be by yourself while in uniform. Zack made a mental note of that.

She tugged on his arm, "Come and visit me sometime if you can get away," she told him quietly. "Come by the church again?"

"I'll sure try," he told her gallantly, shouldering his duffel and acting like it wasn't really all that heavy at all. "I'm Zack by the way."

She smiled at him. "Zack. I'll remember that." She looked him straight in the face, and pinned him with those eyes of hers that suddenly gone all wide and dreamy, like she could see in him, through him, and past him, all at once. "I won't ever be able to forget you, you know, even if everyone else does. You've got the nicest eyes… violet over gray. Pretty."

He frowned. Actually they were just gray. And purple didn't sound like a very tough color for a guy to have. "No they're not!"

She was already waving and walking away, though she did look over her shoulder to flash him an odd little half-smile.

"They will be."

*

Life in the Shinra barracks was hard. It was like all their training couldn't go by fast enough, everything arranged into a forced double-time. Truth be told, it was. The war against Wutai was still raging hard on the other side of the sea, and they weren't looking to budge against any of Shinra's outrageous demands to conquer, control and consume everything of value that the people had to their name. The citizens of Midgar were getting tired of it, tired of the excuses, tired of the useless PR and tired of seeing the dead and dying coming back in bits and pieces and usually not at all. The grunts were sent in, barely out of their haphazard training to be shipped overseas to die under the finest of Wutain blades.

Shinra sent in their finest weapon; the Masamune sheathed in leather and steel and gleaming silver hair. Sephiroth's name was far from unknown to the populace. Madman's son. Beautiful. Brilliant. Powerful. Ruthless. People were sure that he'd bring about the end. They weren't half-wrong.

Yeah, Zack had heard the stories. But Sephiroth was way off in some distant corner of Wutai, making a name for himself… making a _General_ of himself. And meanwhile Zack was slogging his way through the ranks, finishing his training, keeping his eyes steady towards SOLDIER.

And he made it.

It wasn't as if he hadn't worked hard for it—he had. Being in Shinra burned something out of you, mostly your illusions of what you were fighting for and left you only with whatever determination you had left. Maybe it was learning the secrets the glory-talkers back home never talked about. Maybe it was the way the Shinra executives looked down at you and sneered at you for getting yourself into this; under their feet, and at their beck and call. Maybe being in Shinra just taught you how to hate. But gods had he wanted to make it there to the top anyway. There was still glory there. Glory that he could bring home and show the folks back there it was _possible _for some crazy little kid from out in the sticks to come home a hero and a legend, as someone who followed his dreams and succeeded. Glory being at the bottom of the damned ladder certainly wouldn't give him. So yeah, he'd worked for it. Making Third Class was nothing to scoff at, especially when you'd just been a cadet the year before.

Problem was, by that time Shinra was getting desperate and snapped up near everyone fit enough to survive their half-assed training. There were a lot of promotions during those last few years of the war, older Third Class SOLDIERs, more experienced ones, the ones who lived and were able to come back, looked down on his group, and told them if it hadn't been for the war…

Zack hated those whispers, those bitter, knowing grins that hid too much pain that the wearers didn't want to show. Because Zack was going to prove them wrong.

Still, it wasn't like the things they said weren't mostly true. A lot of them _wouldn't _have made SOLDIER in peacetime. Sometimes when things were at their worse and he'd been shunted to extra guard duty as punishment for yet _another _one of his harebrained schemes, he thought about whether or not he might have made it if Shinra weren't desperate and the SOLDIERs weren't dying. But it _was _wartime, and there _were _a lot of newly-classed Thirds being shipped off from Junon. Which meant a lot of mako cells being injected right, left and center. Hojo was in his element.

Not that the mad scientist was altogether too happy about that, if the Shinra grapevine were anything to go by. His experiments were meant to be on only the best, the _finest_ specimens the Planet had to offer. He didn't take well to the relaxing of those standards, but President Shinra's desperation proved to be more than a match for his complaints.

So, only a year after he'd arrived in Midgar and entered the ranks of Shinra's newest cadets, Zack was promoted to SOLDIER, three days after his fifteenth birthday. He was saluted. Someone slipped him a bottle of King Cactuar with a mumbled, "If you're old enough to die for this damned company, you're old enough to try and forget about it." People smiled. People applauded. People oohed and ahhed at how he looked in his new SOLDIER charcoals. And then they all got back to working at throwing themselves in the jaws of Death, Zack included.

Because of course, true to form, Shinra didn't give him much time to celebrate either occasion. He was valuable property now. SOLDIER. Enhanced. And his eyes gleamed with the new mako light, a filmy violet that washed over the gray of his eyes and made them shimmer with an unnatural gleam. People shied away from him now, and he knew it wasn't only the new uniform.

Another four days after that—four mind-breaking days of mako injections and accelerated healing and then the _training_. Mind-numbing, soul-crushing and backbreaking training that betokened 'the last legs' of Shinra's war-training. Field experience would finish them off, Shinra had decided, or the boys could die trying for all Shinra really cared. It didn't take long before he was on a cargo ship with about a hundred others, ferried off to Wutai like the crates of supplies strapped down in the hold. He was also scared fucking shitless.

Not that he'd ever admit that to anyone. He had a reputation to uphold and all, and besides… the other kids were counting on _him _to be all strong and brave and… a SOLDIER. Yeah, this was the adventure he'd always dreamed of, but romanticism's a bit hard to hang onto when you're surrounded by the suffocating stench of too many bodies packed into too small a ship. Enhanced senses had more than their fair share of drawbacks, after all.

And for the first time in a long time, he felt _young_. Like he really was fifteen and not the mid-twenties he tried to pretend he was since it was easier to feel braver if you felt older. Like he was just a little kid dressed up with a stick-rifle in one hand and his mother's old soup pot perched proudly on his head as a helmet playing soldier for a day, marching around in the dirt just outside the front doorstep and protecting the team's stash of chocolate and candy bars.

Stakes were higher in this game. But then, so was the glory. And Zack wanted that glory the way most fifteen-year-old boys wished it for but never had the chance to get. Well, he was getting a chance and he was damn well taking it!

He just wished he'd also gotten the chance to send his mom a letter about going off to Wutai. For all they knew, he was partying himself silly back in Midgar over his recent promotion, not sitting in a cargo hold where the smell of some kid's vomit clung to his nostrils and made the contents of his stomach roil treacherously inside of him in response.

At least he'd got to say goodbye to Aeris before he left.

It was like she'd known.

_His_ only warning had been the afternoon before when the orders were given, and the news had broken out. Everyone had been in a flurry of activity, packing, getting ready, signing off the necessary equipment; gear, materia, weaponry and in a few cases, mounts. That was the thing about being in SOLDIER. Everything needed to be documented. Shinra liked keeping track of their expensive toys even if they didn't mind them getting thrown away for the right purpose.

So it'd taken until the evening before he could wrangle a way out of the building for a little while in an attempt to make a mad dash down below the Plate. Not as if he'd really thought it all the way through, truth be told. Didn't really know if he could catch a train down, see her, and then come back up without missing curfew, on a night where making curfew was _mandatory_ if you didn't want the hounds set on your heels. Shinra didn't hold for deserters, especially not when they'd just injected valuable resources straight into your veins.

She'd been waiting for him at the train station, her strange little half-smile on her face, her eyes unfocused and almost dreamy like that moment the first day when she'd named the color the mako would turn in his eyes.

He'd nearly looked past her at first glance, nearly ran past her to catch the train down to the bottom of the Plate. Her hair was loose and flowed in a mass of curls down her back over the dark gown she'd traded in the turquoise for. She didn't _look_ like Aeris without her ponytail and her bright cheerful colors.

But that'd been the point. He hadn't known how much of a risk she'd been running venturing to the top of the Plate on her own, more than just the usual kind that being a girl in a place like the slums offered. Not then, anyway.

"You're going away tomorrow," she'd said matter-of-factly the moment he'd dug his heels into a stop in front of her.

"…Yeah." It never ceased to amaze him how she could _know_ stuff like that. He knew _why_ of course… she'd told him, she'd told him the first day he'd met her and hadn't lied for all that he knew. But _who_ were these voices of hers and how could they be everywhere? Seeping into the sealed-off rooms at Shinra Headquarters and eavesdropping on the decisions of his superiors and looking deep into the genetic material that made up one boy fresh from the country in order to see the changes the mako would put into effect on his outer appearance. He couldn't _understand_ that and Aeris couldn't explain it to him either.

She'd flung herself at him then, thrown her hands around his neck—he'd grown a bit too tall for her to put her arms around his neck anymore unless she went on tip-toe—and laid her head against his chest for a long moment. "_Be safe,_" she'd whispered, and he could only thank his newly-enhanced hearing to be able to hear her amidst the ruckus of the departing train-boarders. "_Come back._"

Zack fell a little more in love with her right then and there and probably would have said something monumentally stupid in trying to explain this to her if he'd been given half the chance.

Naturally, it fell to it that he wasn't.

With a soft exclamation, she'd pulled away and disappeared into the crowds, ducking around people so fast it was like she'd had a Haste materia on her, despite the fact that he knew she didn't _use_ materia, didn't really need to as a civilian, and pretty much all the city's supplies of it had been commandeered to supply the war anyway. Wutains had a knack for stealing whatever seemed to catch their eye, and materia was something that would catch _anyone's_ eye, especially if they were the stuff the people were most knowledgeable about in the first place. And if the stories of Wutai that floated back—in whispers and fragments, slipping beneath Shinra's seemingly all-powerful Public Relations head—were anything to go by, there were a lot of dead men, and a lot of Wutain carrion birds.

A few minutes later, he'd seen several suits running pell-mell in the direction she'd gone; the distinctive ones that only the Turks wore. It would be a few more years before he began to understand the deep-laid cat and mouse game she and the Turks played with each other, and the complex rules that governed them, mostly implemented later when Tseng took the head of that particular operation.

He was forcefully snapped out of his thoughts of Aeris rather rudely by the sight—and sound and _smell_—of another officer losing his lunch, whether from nerves or seasickness. Zack was inclined to suspect the former rather than the latter, as it was a large ship and so the swaying should have been barely perceptible to the normal soldiers he was shipping out with. But then, one could never tell.

The man in charge stomped up to the railing of the upper balcony overlooking them. "All right, ladies!" he barked, scarlet cloak set swirling with his dramatic hand motions. "We'll be docking in approximately two hours… we've gained control of all the ports on the west side so you won't be dodging enemy shuriken the minute you step off the boat. Give yer thanks to Shinra, we're not putting you out in the field until tomorrow at 0500. Get off, get set up, pick out your flavor of nighttime company, take a nap, I don't give a damn. I'm expectin' y'all to do better than the last batch, and I won't hear nothin' of deserters, you got me?"

Zack tuned him out then. Gods, it wasn't as if they were _kids_…

It was later when they disembarked and the troops fanned out as if they knew where they were going that he realized he probably should've paid attention, if only to find out where the hell _he_ was supposed to be going.

Well he'd certainly paid for it.

His ears were ringing by the time he was sent stumbling through a tent-flap and nearly stepping on a spill of silver hair in the process. That tended to be less than important when the next thing he found was that the owner of said hair was both awake and coiled to spring, and also had a naked sword ready in one hand.

It would forever be a point of shame that the only word he could think of to say to those eyes glowing in the near-dark was a short "_Gluck!_"  
Very suave. Very manly. Just the thing to say to the single most beautiful man Zack had ever laid eyes on, really.

He saw the eyes flicker to his badge and his uniform and the man's hand relax minutely on the hilt of his sword which was one hell of a relief. "May I help you?" the man finally asked quietly.

"Er… I was told… that… this was my tent? Sir?"

Because he recognized that hair. And those eyes. And even that sword, gleaming in the half-light and that just barely managed to lie lengthwise in the confines of the tent. Gods if he got out of this with anything less than a good dressing down, he'd… he'd… he wasn't entirely sure what he was going to do, but he was going to _kill_ the stuffed scarlet idiot who'd even _considered_ ordering him into a superior officer's tent.

Man was probably huffy over the fact that Zack hadn't thought him important enough to listen to orders the first time around and was forcing him into this position of complete and utter embarrassment just to make a point, and quite possibly to kill any chance Zack might have in getting a First Class promotion. Maybe he'd somehow find himself demoted back to toilet scrubber—not that he was sure whether or not there were toilets around here. There certainly wouldn't be when they split off into troops and were led out towards the front. Maybe it'd be his job to dig the latrine trenches from now on. All of them. By himself.

Either way, it was clearly a great first day on—or at least near—the front. Damn it.

The silence that answered him could have meant anything. The General could have been contemplating the weather through the open tent-flap that Zack was still holding in one hand (which was unlikely), contemplating the method of Zack's death (also unlikely, if only for the fact that his sword was already plenty handy and a pretty good bet), listening to the faint snickers and guffaws that came from a relatively safe distance away (more likely), or just digesting Zack's words.

Zack very, very, _very_ much hoped that it was the latter rather than any of the former, and hurried to say, "Must have been a mistake, sir. Never meant to disturb you, sir." He would have ducked back out and run away as fast as his newly-enhanced muscles could have take him—faster than normal civilians sure, but if the General had any inclination to take off after him, he was pretty sure he'd be finding out firsthand whether or not there was a Heaven or a Valhalla or just the Lifestream pretty damned soon—if those eyes hadn't pinned him right where he crouched and that voice hadn't uttered a simple "Come in."

There was still no inflection in that low silky purr of a voice, nothing to indicate whether the General wanted to explain to him the minute details of exactly _how_ he'd go about executing Zack's imminent execution or the directions in which he could follow to find his _own_—hopefully unoccupied—tent. Or patch of ground. He could deal with that too. It certainly sounded a lot better than being eviscerated in his sleep by a man who slept with a naked sword and had the power to shrug it off as an accident on Zack's part without being questioned, that was for sure.

Zack closed the tent flap behind him somewhat uneasily, taking care as not to tread anywhere near the General's shining hair. Once had to be enough.

Without another word, the other man shifted over, deftly moving his sword to his other side, closer to the tent wall. "Your things can go there," he said finally, "Sleep now, you'll need to be up again before long, I suspect. You'll need your rest."

"I'm not a kid," Zack blurted out, before forcefully keeping himself from cringing and slapping a hand over his own big mouth. Because that was obviously what he should do instead of fall to his knees in relief for not having been skewered through the chest by that flagpole of a sword. Yes. Go ahead. Yell at your superior officer. That was the way to do it. "Er… sir," he added lamely, barely catching himself before he ducked his head in embarrassment, forcibly holding his neck stiff and his head high.

Those eyes registered mild surprise, but the voice still didn't change when it told him to "Sit down."

That was an order Zack could follow quite easily without asking questions. He sat.

"How old are you?"

Again the voice was frank, matter-of-fact, and as if he actually _meant_ it, that he really wanted an answer. The idea of Shinra's newly-minted and top-ranking officer wanting to find out something as insignificant as some nameless Third Class SOLDIER's age was almost laughable. "Fifteen. Sir." He said it like a challenge.

Yeah he was young. He was young but he'd done it and gotten this far hadn't he? So Zack squared his jaw and faced those glittering eyes that looked like they belonged to a cat or possibly even a snake, waiting for the smirk, waiting for the roll of eyes and waiting for the look of cold contempt. He wouldn't have been surprised; he'd seen plenty of Shinra's upper brass show their true colors when they came to inspect the new troops. He didn't expect this man to be any different.

"I see."

…He didn't expect that.

Well, it wasn't so much the _words_, as the way the General had said them. As if what Zack said had _puzzled_ him. Surely he knew that Shinra stretched the age of enlistment 'in times of crisis' and that there was no one to say _no, you can't do that, it's not right _because then the President kicked up a little hissy fit for anyone daring to defy him, and usually that ended with the Turks knocking on the door of whatever unfortunate soul dared oppose Shinra. But the General just kept studying him as if he didn't know any of that, those eyes never wavering and hardly blinking at all. That drove him to keep on going. "…Is it a surprise to you, sir?" he ventured.

The General was silent for another moment. And Zack had the distinct impression that the man had a very good reason for it. Commanding officers don't confess their faults to anyone, as a rule, and certainly _never_ to a junior officer like Zack. Especially not when tomorrow he'd be following this man's lead, perhaps even at the front lines of their offensive. He couldn't doubt him. And besides, the General didn't know who he was, couldn't trust him not to walk out later that night or the next night or the night after that to spill any and all secrets this man had to impart.

So because he wanted to keep talking to this man, wanted to listen to that low, even voice that was like silk over an undertone of velvet, he turned to a safer topic quickly, in case the General might reconsider his staying after all.

"I've always wanted to know… how good would I have to be to be able to score  
my own chocobo, sir? Or is there an age limit for that too?"

It took a hard march to get past those mountains, especially since half the bridges that were already there weren't safe to cross and the ones their side had erected were constantly being destroyed before completion, if the debriefing by Major Rattler was anything to go by. It'd be good to have a bird doing half the work for him, and it wasn't like he'd be unable to return the favor by protecting her when the enemy tried to take her down.

The General stared at him, and Zack was quite sure the slight widening of his eyes was out of incredulity and not mockery. "Why would you want to bed your mount in the first place?"

And the man was _serious._

The startled laughter _that_ provoked might have been what startled the man, caused those mako-green eyes to widen just the littlest bit again before he hastened to explain. Clearly General Sephiroth had been around the army for far too long if that was the only definition of the term he'd ever heard.

But this, he came to the conclusion later that night, was going to be the start of a _beautiful _relationship, hotshot Shinra General Sephiroth was or not, and half-mad chocobo-molesting Third Class SOLDIER _he_ was or not.

Weirder things were bound to happen. Especially if he survived tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after that…

*

It wasn't easy. It was bloody _hard _to convince General Sephiroth that it was okay to have friends, especially when you probably looked like a _child_ in his eyes—if the man could truthfully tell the difference between a child and an adult beyond the intellectual, he didn't seem to understand _age_ the way other men did—encrusted in blood and dirt after a long day's fight or not. Harder still to do it while they were off fighting a war Zack was sure they didn't have to, fighting a war in order to satisfy one massive electric conglomerate's greed.

And Sephiroth was always wary, watching him with those _eyes_ as if waiting for him to slip up, waiting for something to happen and expose him for a fake. Not suspicious, exactly, but reluctant to trust him. Which was understandable if you thought about it on a superficial and superfluous level. Why _should_ this hotshot lapdog of Shinra's care two shakes of a dog's tail about some kid out to prove himself? Making friends with superior officers, _especially _when you were in the lower ranks of SOLDIER was generally looked upon as laughable, or just a step up on climbing the promotions ladder. What struck Zack was that he suspected that wasn't _why_, that the General had no true understanding of why fraternizing with those beneath him was usually looked down upon and probably wouldn't even _care_ if anyone ever got up the balls to tell him.

No, what he suspected was that Sephiroth had never trusted anyone in his _life_, had never been told that real friends were forever, and that sometimes love, the good kind of love that everyone wanted to believe in, didn't always turn belly up and die whenever the going got rough.

But he was hearing them now, and the thing was that Sephiroth was _listening_, really listening to what Zack had to say. And Zack held onto the hope that that was a good thing, that it meant the General was slowly coming around.

He'd nearly fucked things up for ever and ever though early on in the game, and who knows what could've happened that day if things hadn't turned out the way they did? It'd been the day a few weeks after he'd made Second Class—which was about eight months after he'd shipped out to Wutai, Shinra had gotten panicky again when their progress wasn't going as expected—when the senses had settled and he'd been sent back out to fight with eyes that glowed just a little more brighter… when he'd gotten his chest scored open with a blade smeared with more poison than his body could break down immediately, leaving him dazedly swaying for a few precious moments. Bad, _bad_ thing to let happen to you when you're on the front lines—Zack still cursed his stupidity as to let that happen, even long after the day's fighting had been over, and the wound closed, because he might have done worse than just plain _dying_.

Getting killed in battle was one thing, letting down your friends when they _counted _on you was by far one of the worst things you could ever do. That he believed above all else, though Aeris had burst into bitter laughter the first time he'd told her, something she could never really explain.

That day the General himself had had to ride in to save his ass—not that it was really glorious or anything, Zack was already past dreaming up stuff like that, and wasn't really the damsel in distress type—but General Sephiroth had _been_ there, and had been quick to save Zack from getting his head separated from his shoulders in that moment of supreme idiocy with a swipe of the Masamune and the green of his eyes burning in sparks and snaps, as if lit with dragonfire.

And gods, the way the man had _glared_ at him, the way he'd turned those burning, furious eyes on him, Zack had known immediately that the General had been _worried_ about him, and was _angry_ about being worried about him. Zack hadn't known he'd been important enough to the General to be worried about, and might have felt somewhat victorious about that if he wasn't so damned scared he'd just fucked things up. Playing with fire like the General probably didn't offer you many second chances.

That night, when they'd set up camp, the General had been colder, sterner, more aloof than Zack had ever seen him.

And more lonely.

Maybe it was because he knew better by then, knew that wary look in the General's eyes as he watched the troops milling about, talking the day's fighting out, talking of all the good things there were to go home to. The _wistful_ look in the General's eyes, like the stuff they were talking about made no sense to him; as if they were beyond comprehension. And that kind of made you hurt for him, because who'd _never_ been to Golden Saucer before _ever—_the funky, clunky tourist trap that it was, or spent days haggling with the merchants down at Wall Market or went off to Cosmo Canyon for the really good kind of bootleg that'd fuck you over for three days straight? Just _what_ kind of life could the General lead that was made up solely of the bad experiences in life and none of the good?

Zack had fully intended on finding out, on making _sure_ that the rest of Sephiroth's life wouldn't follow the same pattern. He liked to think he'd followed through with that promise to himself and to Sephiroth too, though neither of them had ever voiced it aloud.

But that didn't change the fact that General Sephiroth had tried to push him away that day. After the cursory query as to whether or not he was all right, if the wounds he'd taken had been Cured satisfactorily, he'd turned to leave, silent and solemn and so damned _controlled_.

Zack hadn't stood for that, grabbing him by the arm and refusing to let go, even when he saw the ice in his commanding officer's glowing cat eyes. It had taken a good lot of prodding, a good many demands, and a _heck_ of a lot of rules that he ignored about dignity and decorum and respect owed a superior officer to get the General to crack. And then the General had… well, he hadn't quite _yelled_, but with that much controlled rage packed into a single voice that was almost _shaking_ and hitting notes like an unstrung harp, it'd felt even worse and hit even harder.

"You could've _died_. You could've… _left_."

_You could've left me…_

It had hit him then. The _me_ Sephiroth couldn't force himself to say, couldn't force himself to admit. Here Zack had been trying to help the man open up, make him think past the blood and the steel and the war around them, and he'd gone and done something so monumentally stupid… he might've gotten himself killed, and showed the man that _this_ was what happens when you let yourself start to care.

And Zack swore to himself he'd never slip up like that again. He'd _succeed_ damn it, and he'd show the man that he'd survive anything Sephiroth's world could throw at him, could take it and keep on standing at his side like friends were supposed to.

Sephiroth's plans to keep him away, at arm's length _weren't_ going to work because now he was damned well stuck with him, and Zack wasn't going anywhere, wasn't going to be dropped like an old hat and pushed aside just like that, General Sephiroth, _sir!_

He'd had to let go of the man's lapels then, feeling mildly ridiculous, a fifteen-going-on-sixteen Second Class SOLDIER looking as if to intimidate what could probably be the most dangerous force to ever walk the Planet, who stood as tall and stiff as if he'd been carved of marble and steel against Zack's half thought out tirade.

The General had stared at him when he said that; the anger had receded and Zack could see the startled puzzlement again, in the very depths of his eyes.

And the way he watched Zack panting with the effort of yelling at him, of waving his arms like a right fool and trying to make Sephiroth _understand_… there was that wistfulness again, like he was listening and trying to believe, trying to _understand_ when Zack ranted and raved about friends and trust no matter _what_ happens.

"I would never be able to forgive myself if I let it happen," Sephiroth informed him tonelessly, warily, and _quietly_, as if it cost him more to say than anything else he'd ever let pass his lips and he wanted no one, _no one_ else to hear, especially not the First Class SOLDIERs still in camp and probably craning an ear at their… ah… conversation. It couldn't really be a screaming match if only Zack did all the yelling, but he wouldn't go so far as to assume he'd been _lecturing_ the General either. "If I let you die and could have prevented it, could have been there…"

"You're never going to have to," Zack had replied, his voice as dead serious as any he'd ever used because that had _not _been the time for jokes and laughing reassurances, "'cause we're going back to Midgar after this damned war's over. I'm going to work my ass off for a spot in First Class, and then I'm going to follow wherever you lead, General Sephiroth, sir, for as long as you're going to need me around."

He hadn't quite been able to catalogue the _look_ the General had given him; something between shocked bewilderment and… maybe, just _maybe_ it could've been the early stages of _hope_.

Zack would take what small victories he could get and _beamed_ internally at the warm feeling that realization brought.

"Then… if… _when_ you make First Class," the man had said, looking away and back towards the flickering red of the campfires not too far away, especially from their vantage point on the small rise, "you won't have to call me… you wouldn't need to address me so… formally…"

It had looked like it'd taken real effort not to end that with an upward lilt, to make it a question as the man glanced back at him, waiting for a response, _testing_ him.

"You'll be my boss," Zack had responded instantly, "And a damn sight better one than Major Rattler or the President could ever hope to be. And I'm going to have to call you that, Seph," —he'd hoped the slight hesitation before his shameless liberty-taking of daring to _nickname_ the General would go unnoticed— "because anything else I'd probably come up with won't just be informal, it'd be downright _improper_ and I _know_ you wouldn't want to be saddled with the name _Kitten_ for the rest of your natural life, huh?"

Sephiroth hadn't been able to answer that with anything other than an incredulous look. He probably hadn't even been able to understand why Zack had burst out laughing at the sight of it.

Zack had a long way to go. Yeah, he knew that. Be he was also damned sure he was going to _succeed_ with this man. _Somehow_. No matter what it took.

…He always did like chasing dreams…

*

It hadn't taken long at all to find out that letters were hard to send.

There was the obvious bit about the fact that Shinra didn't care a whit about the men and boys they shipped off to Wutai so long as they heard good reports that they were winning, and ships sent out for the express purpose of returning with letters for family, friends and loved ones were reserved only for fever-fantasies and dying hopes. More than training in Shinra itself, fighting in the mountains surrounding Wutai stripped you of petty illusions like that. The occasional shipment of new troops presented chances to send something back home, and there were many in Zack's squad who mobbed the docks or got someone else to mob the docks when the boats came in, just to send something home.

Zack doubted much of what they wrote made it past the censors. Shinra didn't want the people to _know_ how life in the field was like. Didn't make a good impression, and they wanted the campaign to seem as illustrious as possible, merely to keep uprisings at a minimum, especially with all their special SOLDIER toys shipped out across the sea.

But that wasn't the problem.

There was also the problem of what he couldn't say. Without talking about his experiences, what he wrote down on that paper _wasn't him_. Although… truthfully, it wasn't as if he particularly _wanted_ to write up most of his experiences for their viewing pleasure. He figured his father was angry enough about his being gone without being informed about a war that didn't seem to be in any way over, even after fighting so long in it. And he also figured his mother was worried enough as it was without writing back about the little girl who'd clutched at his leg and hadn't let go while her father—he assumed the man was her father, it wasn't as if he'd ever be able to go ask now—hacked at him with his sword, which had dangerously awkward to block when he couldn't move without hurting the girl.

And he hadn't been able to keep from hurting the girl, not when he saw the desperation on both their faces, not when he could see the kamikaze fearlessness in hers that he might have called insanity if not for the fact that later, he almost respected her for it. He'd kicked out with the leg she was holding at first, still trying for gentleness even as he blocked an overhead sweep from her father, trying to shake her off. But there was no gentleness in his own desperate grab for life not long after, when he'd finally succeeded in kicking her off, and sent her flying when more Wutains burst out of the trees, from almost directly overhead.

She'd lain terribly still when it was over, her little feet trapped beneath the body of her father, the spreading stain of his blood seeping into her clothes as she stared sightlessly up at the clouds through the frame of leafy green. He hadn't been able to forget that, wanted to know what sort of desperation or patriotism or hell, maybe even love, that would drive a little girl like that into this kind of war… wanted to know why any man among them would use a child like an attack dog or pit bull for the express purpose of latching on and never letting go.

Actually, when it came down to it, he wasn't sure he really _wanted_ to understand.

Only a few more years, and she could've been as old as he was.

And hell if he didn't need reminders as to exactly how old—or young—he was. You stopped wanting glory when you started fighting, when the blood flaked off your skin and caked in your hair with a mixture of dirt and sweat and other things he dared not name. That didn't happen so often now, not after he'd been promoted to Second Class. After he'd gotten faster, stronger, even more disillusioned than he thought he was capable of being. Faster than most of the people he fought, and his sword kept them at a distance, though not the impersonal level of a rifle.

He hated his gun, spent as much time as possible avoiding it. It didn't _fit_ in his hand like his sword did, didn't _sing_ when he swung it. Kept the death so damned far away, it became impersonal, methodical, and he never wanted to become something that didn't care about the death he caused. Make him shut his heart up so tight and small and deep inside his chest he'd never be able to find it again. So maybe teaching Sephiroth about something besides the war was also about reminding himself about the exact same thing too.

Besides, there was no use swinging a gun around like that anyway. He might have shot a toe off or something.

Maybe he could use that as an excuse the next time Heidigger came out to the fort to 'check up' on things. Man didn't really to haul all that gut around, did he?

His sixteenth birthday came and went like all the rest of the grim, dreary, life-threatening days that made up the time in Wutai. Not that it was boring there. Far from it. Who could be bored when several sacks of scorpions had been tossed over the frontal walls by Wutain ninja the week his squad had been off the front and sent to the back lines to 'recuperate'? Or when they'd gotten lost in that spot of jungle and several of their party had caught something in that damp, soggy air? Who could be bored when you saw your men dying?

So he hadn't really remembered his birthday was coming up, and it was the farthest thing on his mind when the day came because that was the day—when he counted back—that he'd been protecting another one of their damned bridges, only halfway to the goddamned city itself. If there was one thing Wutai was good at, it was making them fight for _every single goddamned inch_. They didn't back off. Hell no. They didn't even _surrender _when there was nowhere else to run.

None of the tiny little villages they came through would let them pass, would give in. Zack had watched a little old lady with a _stewpot_ come at him, waving it over her head screaming like a banshee before she'd been shot down by one of their snipers. He'd seen a mother holding a newborn running away from them, throwing it over the cliff with a shrill cry, and screaming at them, _screaming _at them with tears in her wild eyes as she threw herself after her child and down to the rocks below.

Stuff like that you couldn't forget; it was the stuff nightmares were made of and it pretty much blocked out anything that might seem better in your life like knowing you were another year older. So yeah, he hadn't remembered.

And the letters sent to _him _came afterwards, nearly a week too late to remind him. There'd been others who'd remembered for him. And there were two letters. One from his parents; his mother demanding whether or not he was getting enough to eat, were the lodgings comfortable, how bad the fighting was, and he wasn't hurt, was he? His father wanted to know if he regained his senses yet and was at all ready to come home and forget about a war he didn't have to fight.

Zack had never had the heart to tell them that when Shinra took you, they only let you back out if you were worthless or dead. And no one wanted to be either.

The other letter was from Aeris, along with a fat little package neatly wrapped in plain brown paper and tied securely with a piece of twine. Aeris, to whom he'd only written a single, stilted letter inquiring as to her health, how her flowers were, her mother, the church, the fat little puppy that followed her around Wall Market when she went there to go shopping… anything and everything he could come up with that could fill up a page and yet run circles around what he really wanted to ask and what he really wanted to say.

But what was the point? The censors…

Not that he didn't suspect that she could probably figure it out anyway.

Still…

_I want you here. I want you to be here with me so that I know you're there, that you'll help wake me from this nightmare when doesn't seem like it'll ever end._

Stupid, useless, monumentally embarrassing, and never _ever_ leaving the confines of his own head. Besides, even if he could somehow edit it to sound marginally less embarrassing, it still somehow seemed a greater promise to make here, only a mile or so away from the site where the day's battle had taken place, the stench of dead and dying thick in the air around the camp. Didn't seem right, making promises he couldn't be sure of keeping, not even if he was sure she'd understand. He had brave words for Seph, but not always for himself.

The first thing that hit his nose when he shook the letter out of the envelope and unfolded it was the scent of flowers; sweet and faint and gone within moments, a passing memory of long hours in the church with the faint sounds of music and companionable laughter.

He might have expected that, because it was Aeris after all, and the church really _was_ the best place for her to have written from.

And the first thing that hit his eyes when he shook the letter out of the envelope and unfolded it was a little drawing of a frowning stick figure with its little stick hands on its little stick hips—or what Zack assumed were hips, he didn't often draw or see many stick figures, but they were probably not part of really bendy legs—that took up its own little corner of the page. _You're trying to hide things from me again!_ admonished the little speech bubble that emanated from the side of the stick figure's head.  
And that was a little weird, because he knew Aeris could draw better than that, and knew that she usually did.

_My dear silly little Zack,_

Zack frowned. He was many things but he wasn't _little_ and he wasn't _silly!_

_Yes Zack. Little. Silly._

_Please refer to the speech bubble above. Now, is that a nice thing to do to your bestest girl friend in the entire world? I might have to pull out the old soggy kitten look. You can't not-remember the soggy kitten look. I taught you its secrets so well you never could pass through Wall Market without being handed at least six free cookies while wearing it. Don't deny it; your dashing good looks had nothing to do with it._

_I don't need to ask how you're doing, do I? Sound—relatively speaking, of course, you must have earned your fair share of cuts and scrapes and bruises and nasty little squishy things in your boots—in body, and decidedly rumpled in mind, spirit and soul, right? But no, knowing you, you'd either lie to me—I _know_ you, Zack! Just to make me feel better, just to try and make me not worry—or you'll ham up the unimportant bits just for the sake of an extra cookie and a good back massage and to change the subject._

It was… weird, to be read so easily like that. And it wasn't because Aeris was outfitted with all the sparkly magical powers that you only really heard about in stories from crazy old men who had too much to drink. But it was still… nice… to be able to have someone understand, and have someone understand so _well_. It was… relieving, in its own way. Like he didn't have to worry that he might have screwed up by being unable to write _properly_ and having her still knowing what he'd tried to say.

_They're not going to let you come back in between the fighting, are they? I don't think _

—and there, the censors had blocked out the next few words, but Zack knew they had to be 'mean old President Shinra'—

_would let you have a holiday, right? Or maybe there's someone else you have to stay to stick by, and that's good too. _

_I miss you Zack. I'm going to tell you that, even though you can't admit as much back to me on paper—you'd better say it to my face next time we meet, you hear?—and I'm going to keep missing you however long it takes. You've been gone a year now, you know. And it's going to take a while longer before it's over. But I'm going to be here when you get back._

_Run, run as fast as they can, they'll never catch me, because I'm… faster than they are!_

_Love,_

_Your favorite flower girl_

He eyed the last line with a raised eyebrow. One day Aeris was going to _tell_ him what the Turks wanted with her, why she had to run and keep running from them. Why she couldn't even sign a letter with her own name when she'd once given it so freely to _him_, some random nobody she'd seen on the streets.

Or at least, so he liked to think. That she'd give up the secret, anyway. He didn't have to be a genius to know that being friends with him, knowing him, having anything to _do_ with him, was a huge risk in and of itself. He had a feeling no other girl in such a position would've liked him enough or been crazy enough to take the risk, or a bigger one by telling him more.

He also had the feeling that was half the fun for Aeris. The girl was insane in the very best of ways, and thinking that maybe he was also worth the risk too just made that nice feeling in his chest get a little warmer, made him think more of the nice things about Midgar and less about the stench of dead and dying in the air.

He missed her. Just reading her words just weren't good enough. Neither was opening the little package and pulling out the scarf she'd sent; Merino wool—hey, he was a country boy, you learned stuff out there in the sticks—dyed a dark, rich blue. Not too bright—wouldn't do for running around in the forest playing soldier, after all—but it was far from drab, and was neatly knitted without a single dropped stitch. He couldn't be entirely too sure how much the thing had cost her to make, but even with all her perfected bargaining skills that he'd seen often enough firsthand, he knew how much the stuff sold in normal times. And it wasn't as if Aeris lived in the better sections of town, either.

Besides, knowing Shinra, they'd just go about jacking up prices everywhere they could—support our army, our boys out there dying for you, fighting for your wellbeing!—and those prices would most undoubtedly have filtered down below the Plate to the Slums. Everyone wanted a profit… that was just the way the city went.

Right. It was decided. The moment he got back to Midgar, he was buying her something shiny and asking her out on a date. Maybe even let her meet Sephiroth, see if _he_ could do anything about the Turks that were following her around. The General would be even more famous by then, even more powerful. Zack _hated _trading on their friendship for anything, but if he could _help_ Aeris, keep her safe, then… perhaps by then Sephiroth would understand. Perhaps by then…

…Heh. Oh the days when everything had been so _simple_…

_*  
_

Long chapter is long. ^_^; The next won't be quite so long, but I wanted all corners battened down and now seemed as good a place as any.


	3. Chapter 02: This Is How It Is

**Title:** Revenant (previously known only as "The Zackfic")  
**Author:** **mirroredsakura**  
**Fandom:** FFVII  
**Rating:** PG-13  
**Warnings:** Boys who like other boys. Extended canon deviation. Non-explicit sexual situations. The works.

**Summary:** The day before the Last Battle is one of questions, and Cloud is full of them. And Sephiroth... well, Sephiroth has human enough left in him to make an offer. Go back. Answer your questions. Try and kill me. Rise from your melancholy and be the man who stands as my enemy, who knows what it is to be my puppet.

**Disclaimers:** I had a dream where I had these three boys with me. It was a grand and glorious dream. It was also ten years too late to claim rights over them. You know the feeling.

**Chapter Two: This Is How It Is**

*

_Slip, slide, stumble forward in time_

*

Cloud threw himself on the bedrock with a groan, wincing as he listened to the sound of the Ultima Weapon clatter to the ground next to him a moment later, and resisted the urge to turn over and pet the thing in apology. A silly habit. Especially when the sword didn't matter to him so much as the other, the _first_. As if on a whim, he unsheathed it… the original Buster sword, quiet and still deadly. The thing was his, _his_ in a way none of the other swords he'd gone through had been because patchwork memory or not, it had always _been_ there. The others… _those_ had been sold nearly as fast as they'd been found or bought or given to him. This was different. Special. If he ever got around to retiring, this and possibly one or two others would be the only ones he'd hang on his wall and point to if he ever had cause to wax poetic about his glory days.

...This was running under the assumption that he'd ever consider these his glory days.

Wandering the length and breadth of the Planet with a ragtag mob of terrorists, ninjas and vampires. Racing after a man who was bent on destroying everything. Fighting the WEAPONs that were supposed to have awakened to help _stop_ the calamity, but instead were there to wipe out the entirety of the human race along with it. Falling into the Lifestream itself and taking refuge in the very recesses of his own mind. Failing a woman he loved and letting her die.

And now… waiting to make the last descent into the Northern Crater and face the man whom he hated-_loved_-_**hated**_ more than anything.

The soft groan he let out was one of utmost weariness; something he couldn't allow any of the others to even begin to suspect. Not when tomorrow… tomorrow, they'd…

"Cloud?" The voice was uncharacteristically quiet, almost hesitant. His eyelids flickered open before he'd even realized he'd closed them and turned his eyes to watch Tifa's approach, rusty-red shoes making soft clacking noises against the gravel and pebbles that were scattered liberally over the rock face. "Yeah?"

"Can I—?" she gestured to the spot next to him, and he made a 'go ahead' motion with one gloved hand. A moment or two later, she was settled down on the rock next to him, one hand running through the soft spikes of his hair under the pretense of dusting the gravel off. He closed his eyes and allowed it, knowing better than anyone that she was thinking of what they had gone through and what was to come. His hair could afford to be treated like a petting chocobo for a little while.

"What do you think will happen? You know… tomorrow?"

Cloud opened his mouth to give his best attempt at a stirring speech about freedom and liberty and victory… and then stopped.

Tifa, more than anyone, perhaps even more than himself, knew everything, and would _know_ if he tried to lie. She'd dived after him into his psyche, brought him back to the surface, brought him back to _himself_, and he was _grateful_ for that, but still, who knew what sort of secrets she'd stumbled upon in his mind?

Perhaps it was for his own good that she didn't tell him all the answers, but he could never really shake the sense of betrayal that'd washed over him when he'd learned that she'd _lied_ to him.

_"Best friends, right Cloud?"_

"I don't know." He sat up, looking up at the red of the sunset burning even darker with the sickly glow of Meteor off in the distance. "I'd like to think… that we can stop that from falling."

Who knew if Holy was enough, after all? It seemed so… final. Way too important for a test. There'd be no second chances for the Planet this time around if they failed.

A strangely bitter smile passed over her face as she clasped her arms around her knees—Cloud had long since given up on telling her that she flashed her panties at everything in sight when she did that, because she just nodded, kept on doing it, and didn't seem to care. He figured she had a good enough, left- and right-hook—this was without continuing on about the effectiveness of her roundhouse kicks—to her name that she could fend off any and all unwanted attentions, and was long since past blushing like a tomato every time she finished off one of her Limits. "Not what I expected of our illustrious leader, Cloud..."

That got a low chuckle out of him. "Way to inspire the troops, huh?"

"Exactly."

"Think I'll be any better at it in the morning?"

"Well you've still got time to practice…"

And then the silence fell again, the two of them watching the sun set in the distance while a few insects attempted to ease that unnatural stillness. The whole Planet was waiting for the next day and sleep would not come to it until it was all over.

Tifa shuffled her feet in the pebbles again, before she leaned her head against his shoulder and he let her, even going so far as to wrap an arm around her shoulders. She hummed a little noise of pure contentment and he felt his heart warm, felt something other than the guilt he held so close to his chest. "Can we stay like this?" she asked finally, "Just for a little while?"

"…Sure."

Time didn't seem to matter after that. Cloud's attentions shifted back to the sky, watched it continue to darken into night around them until the stars came out; weak and white against Meteor's glow. Tifa was long asleep by then, breathing quiet and slow, warm against the side of him, and utterly oblivious to his thoughts.

And because he was Cloud, his thoughts turned to things of the past, to things dead and gone… Shinra, Jessie, those above and below the Plate when it fell on Sector Seven...

Aeris. And Zack. And… Sephiroth.

When had it begun? Would killing Sephiroth, destroying Jenova… would that change things? Would they be happy then?

He was empty. _Empty._ There was nothing left—not the anger, not the sadness, not the fear and anguish. Tomorrow maybe. Tomorrow it might come back, that rush of strength and brought on by sheer willpower. But tonight, just for tonight, he could go away, draw back inside where there was only a little floating island in a galaxy of stars. For now he could sit, he could wait. Because that was all that was left. Just this waiting, just this reason… A lifeless little doll given a purpose and told to march until he either succeeded or was destroyed in the attempt.

"You reek of indecision, Cloud."

The Buster sword was in his hand even before the voice had finished speaking; the soft low silk and knowing purr of a voice that he knew all too well, laced with knife-edge cruelty he knew even better. Cloud's hand closed around Tifa's shoulder, shaking her. When she didn't awake, when she didn't even _respond_, he glanced at her too-still features once before jerking his gaze back on the towering figure of leather and steel that had appeared, choking on the rising fury and the icy backwash of fear. "What have you done to her?!"

_First Aeris, now—?!_

"Peace, Cloud, she merely dreams." The smirk twisted the man's lips, taunting the anger that rose up in him, made him want to smash that perfect face with its perfect bow lips until Sephiroth _looked_ as much of the monster as he truly was.

The little whimper that escaped Tifa's lips was barely audible, but neither Cloud nor Sephiroth could have missed it. Sephiroth's smile widened. "Unpleasant dreams, I'm afraid…"

"Let her go."

The other man's voice dropped even lower; dark silk on even darker velvet, taunting him. "Do you need her to stop me, Cloud?"

Cloud's hand tightened on the hilt of the buster sword, even as he laid Tifa gently down on the rock face, an action that would have, if nothing else, woken her completely if Sephiroth hadn't… _done_ something to her. "I don't need anyone else to be able to defeat you."

Brave words, he thought wryly to himself as he watched Sephiroth's eyebrows rise in response. Precious little puppet's growing a spine. Anger. Yes, anger, that would bring him back. Give him the strength to face this monster that wore Sephiroth's face. That would let him win. Because he had to win. He _had_ to!

"So you say…"

Sephiroth took another step towards him, the crunch of gravel underfoot and the clatter of pebbles could only be heard because the man had meant for it happen, because every movement was so carefully calculated, nothing about him happened if he didn't want it; Cloud knew as well as anyone how soundlessly the man could move, even when he'd only been merely human. The seemingly innocuous sound was as close as Sephiroth would give to an overt threat, as much as the baleful glance he cast on Tifa's sleeping form, or the twitching of the hand towards the Masamune that might have been threat, might have been reflex. After all, this girl had struck out at him before, many years ago, and had survived. "Can you prove it to me?"

Cloud charged at him, thinking, _hoping_, that this was only an image… that Sephiroth really was waiting for him in the Northern Crater and was only trying to provoke him, trying to plant doubts in him, and could be _banished_ somehow.

Sephiroth sidestepped his downward slash with the rustle of leather and the grace of a dancer, hand shooting out to grab Cloud's wrist and twist it, hard enough to make him cry out, hard enough to make him _drop his sword_.

Cloud could see his death playing out the moment he heard the clatter of his sword falling to the ground and being kicked out of the way with one black leather boot, let out a strangled noise that was everything; fury, shame, anger, and utter humiliation all rolled into something he couldn't express in _words_.

And then he felt Sephiroth's hands close around his throat, hauling him up until there was only air beneath his boots and he couldn't get free, couldn't make him let go, and—

"Is it too hard to try and kill me now?" Sephiroth asked; his voice barely a whisper and his lips so close Cloud felt them brush over his own like a mockery of gentleness. Sephiroth's voice was slow and unhurried… at odds with the fact that his hands around Cloud's throat were like a band of iron choking the life out of him, and the insane laughter glittered in his eyes, "Where are all your brave words now?"

"I—" Cloud managed to gasp out before he was quickly cut off.

"You want to change things. You are not content with what already is. You have lost your focus. You are _hiding_ again, Cloud. My poor little puppet, a broken little bird." The words were matter-of-fact and to the point, falling on him like stones because fuck him they were _true_, even as he jerked at the grip on his throat that lifted his feet off the ground, feeling the blood pound hard in ears as he tried to form the words, _stop, stop, **stop!**_

Sephiroth dropped him suddenly, and Cloud fell to his knees gagging, coughing, feeling as pitiful as he'd ever felt when he was nothing more than a child, like all the years since then hadn't happened, hadn't _mattered_. Undaunted, it seemed Sephiroth had only spared his life in order to get a better grip on him because a moment later, both his wrists were clamped in Sephiroth's hands; immovable, even when he lashed out with his legs like a child.

"Do you really believe if you could go back, you could change things? That you could have…" and here, Sephiroth couldn't hold back the laugh, "that you could have _saved_ me? Saved that Ancient?"

Cloud hadn't known his eyes had filled with tears until he felt Sephiroth dip forward, silver hair like heavy silk brushing against his skin—soft, cool, he remembered that feeling, remembered the sensation of all that hair draped all along him like an embrace of its own, sharp, as if a memory long forgotten, oh no, no, not another one—before the man's tongue flicked out to the saltwater sliding down his cheek. The man pulled away again before Cloud could cringe back, struggling against him, _hating_ him and hating himself, and there was something new in Sephiroth's eyes: surprise and faint amusement and he looked, for a single moment he _looked_ like Sephiroth, the _real_ Sephiroth, the one both he and Zack remembered and he didn't want that, didn't want to remember the betrayal, didn't want to remember that the man he was trying so desperately to kill was the man he'd—_no!_

"So you do. You want to change what was."

"Who wouldn't?" Cloud ground out, jerking fruitlessly at his trapped wrists again, "Do I look happy with what you've done?" He wasn't going to cry, no, he was not fucking going to _cry_. He was not a child. He was a grown man and this thing, this _killer_, would not win, not that much. "This is more of your little half-truths, more of your lives. You're trying to prove to me that I'll fail, that I'll never compare—that I'll never defeat you!"

And he couldn't believe that, couldn't let himself believe that for a minute, not when the others were counting on him. Not when he'd never forgive himself if he let this man, this man who'd used him and tossed him aside, this man he hated more than _anything_ because of what he'd done, what he wanted to do, _live!_

"Interesting…"

And then Cloud was falling, stumbling backwards, as he watched the image of Sephiroth waver, and for a brief moment there was a rush of relief, that it _was_ only a fake, that Sephiroth wasn't actually _here_ or maybe he was just dreaming again and Sephiroth was playing with his mind and it was all just a—

But Sephiroth was laughing—the kind of laughter that ate at Cloud's insides because he could _remember_, remember a time when he'd wished more than _anything_ to hear General Sephiroth's laughter, but not like this, _never_ like this. His head was thrown back baring the long pale line of his throat, and his shoulders shook before he let it fall forward, shaking it as the laughter faded into what in any other man would have been a chuckle. "Then you will go back," he said, and Cloud felt the build-up of raw magic like what happened just before unleashing a summon but _more_, and dove for his sword.

Sephiroth ignored him, continuing as if he hadn't even noticed Cloud was armed and angry enough to slice his throat open. "Try and change the past, Cloud. Come to me. Change me. Kill me. See what you can do. We will see your grand future then…"

Cloud opened his mouth to scream at him, that it was impossible, that Sephiroth wasn't supposed to have the power or the _knowledge_—and then he felt the Lifestream, as if the ground had opened up and the green of the Planet had welled up around them, because he could hear the Cetra and they were _singing_, they were _agreeing_ with Sephiroth and that wasn't supposed to _happen_ because he was the _enemy!_

But then their singing surrounded him, flowing into his mind and resounding in his head; hundreds and thousands and millions of voices chorusing together, all parts of a single whole.

_He's waiting for you to come and find him…_

_He's waiting for you to come and kill him…_

_He's waiting for you to come and deliver him…_

_He's waiting for you to come and save him…_

_**Save him, Cloud…**_

That last… _Aeris…?_

He was screaming and he couldn't even hear himself because the roar of Sephiroth's and the Cetra's magic exploded around him, tearing the ground away from him and he was _moving_, the air was rushing past him in a shrill screech of sound.

How was he fit to save anyone… if he hadn't even been able to save _her?_

There might have been an answer, a whisper in the back of his mind that he could hear past the screaming of the wind in his ears. He could _feel_ her presence, like a brush of sweetness and warmth and the faint scent of flowers as he flew through the nothingness, in the cool of the Lifestream that washed over him and carried him along with it; _It's all connected, Cloud._

But it was as gone as fast as it had come, and he was left with only the howling of air as the noise reached a crescendo that he screamed against, couldn't bear, couldn't guard himself against because his arms wouldn't _move_ and the world was exploding a second time, smashing through time and space and he didn't know what else, and he was blinded by the white.

For a moment the rushing stopped and it was like he hung motionless in midair, the silence as loud as the screaming before he began to _fall_, and the darkness rushed past him, taking him to oblivion.

**_I'm waiting…_**

*

Whee, I actually have enough left in me to make some neat last-minute changes/additions to this bit! ^___^ Not bad, considering I haven't been in any state to write fic for _months_ now. This was short, but it wasn't really a chapter, more of an inbetween. ^_^; You'll see a lot more of them in future I'm thinking.


	4. Chapter 03: A Time for War

**Title:** Revenant (previously known only as The "Zackfic")  
**Author:** **mirroredsakura**  
**Fandom:** FFVII  
**Rating:** PG-13  
**Warnings:** Boys who like other boys. Extended canon deviation. Non-explicit sexual situations. The works.

**Summary:** Zack and General Sephiroth find a stranger lying in the trees. A stranger with mako eyes, reflexes on par with Sephiroth's, and so much anger, so much hate. What's a pair of SOLDIERs to do?

**Disclaimers:** They belong to Square-Enix.

**Notes: **All horrible syntax errors from the previous chapters have been FIXED. Dear god, that teaches me to just upload and post without actually going in-depth into check that all my documents were left unchanged from the original document! What happened was that all my apostrophes and ellipses and such were stripped from the text, probably because they were auto-formatted by Word into special characters. It's much more readable now, I promise. I'm so sorry for those of you who had to live with that... I never even noticed! I can't even imagine how many people I must've scared off with my apparent inability to spell!

**Chapter Three: A Time for War**

*

Zack was not a stranger to screams. Or to loud explosions. Or even to bright flares of blinding white light. Especially after three years of fighting in a war that was now, only now, beginning to reach its grand conclusion.

But all of that—the screams and the explosions and the impressive searing light show—in the middle of the night, almost _fourteen feet away_ from where he and the General were standing on patrol duty was something new, even in wartime. Wutains relied on stealth at night, on their ninjas and snipers, not usually on their magic.

…And even if they were trying new tactics in their surge of desperation, even then they wouldn't usually start screaming first.

Sephiroth was tearing past him within moments, the black of his coat swallowed in the darkness of the surrounding trees as the white flares died down and began to fade. The silver of his hair was like a flag to follow as Zack dashed after him, sword naked and ready in his hand.

Zack couldn't be sure what Sephiroth was expecting… a trap? A stampede? But _he _sure hadn't expected a single figure dressed in a SOLDIER uniform—well, kind of, he was missing a shoulder-guard, and the one that he _did _have looked a little worse for wear— lying passed out on the ground in a circle of white fire, with one hand fisted around the hilt of a—

"Zack…" Sephiroth said quietly from his position further up, standing just outside the ring of dying flames with the unsheathed Masamune lowered. There was surprise and confusion in that voice if one cared to look for it, seemingly apparent only to him who'd spent veritable _months _learning the minute changes in the other man's voice during the times when he couldn't watch the man's eyes. "The sword he's holding… why is he holding your sword?"

And then the world was changed forever because there was only _one _Buster sword on the whole of the Planet, and _that_ was in Zack's own hand right that very moment, singing out to its twin in a call of like to like that he could feel thrumming through him from its very core.

Then the boy's eyes flew open.

*

His eyes hurt; the ground burned and he was pressed against it, the sharp spines of coarse wild grass prickling his cheek, but there was no fire, no flame. Still, there was light, so much light, sharp and white-hot and he was screaming as he turned away and clawed at the ground, fighting to force his muscles to bring him up to his elbows, to look away. The scent of trees told him _forest,_ the reddish light in the distance told him he was near a camp or—and it could very well be possible—Nibelheim?

Sephiroth and the Cetra wouldn't have sent him back to _that night_ would they?

He forced himself to his feet, grunting with the effort, and only his grip on the hilt of his sword kept him up when he felt his legs nearly give out from beneath him, his eyes on that reddish light.

But no… the light wasn't burning bright enough to be a village in flames though he could smell the char, and there was no screaming. Relief washed over him as he picked out the details; the stars were strange and the trees were unfamiliar and—

—there was nothing at all unfamiliar about that figure standing almost dead center behind him, half-hidden by a tree with those strange glowing eyes of his.

"_SEPHIROTH!_"

The man actually had the audacity to look _startled_; blinking at him with those eyes of his like he didn't _know_ him, like he didn't know what he'd just _put _Cloud through, crushing him under the weight of the Lifestream until there was no breath left, no feeling, nothing but the feel of his sword hilt clenched hard in his fist. He could hate him. He could hate him, he could _blame_ Sephiroth for this in a way he could never blame Aeris…

"You have mako eyes… are you not a SOLDIER?" the words were calm, so deceptively calm, but Cloud could _see, _see the grip tightening on the Masamune, the narrowing of those cat's eyes. "What is this insubordination?"

And _that_ might have stopped him if he were thinking straight, might have made him recognize that grave solemnity like the man didn't quite know how to smile, much less laugh. But right then, just then, there was only the pounding of blood in his ears, and the all-consuming rage as he charged forward.

Whether he needed saving or not, if Sephiroth was asking for death, Cloud was going to give it to him.

Whether he wanted it or not, Sephiroth was going to _pay_.

*

It must have been a shock. Zack could only stare from the sidelines, watching as the guy stopped screaming in an obvious attempt to orient himself, head flicking this way and that at the vague glimpse of sky and starlight the sparsely-leafed branches afforded beyond the glare of the dying white fire. Even from that distance—SOLDIER senses again?—he could see the guy's nostrils flares, breathing in the smell of the place.

Zack breathed in too, testing; the scent of the surrounding trees, deciduous and nothing like the range of thick jungle they'd passed through several hundred miles back which had been both wet and sticky to navigate. And something new—cool and quiet and _green_. Mako? No… wilder than that… _Lifestream? _But this was _nothing_ like Mideel.

There was a reddish glow from behind him, the faint light of the camp. It was far from main base of course, and so there were a good deal more campfires set up in it which were much more convenient when the soldiers carried a good deal more Fire materia than they did proper lanterns.

But that seemed to be what set the guy off though, if the way he suddenly hauled himself up and lurched to his feet to see better was any indication. From his vantage point, Zack could see the confusion, the look of _this isn't right…_ that seemed to steady the guy somehow, enough to make him look away and sweep around himself again to get his bearings.

Maybe he was harmless after all. Someone they could just bring in quietly, tag, and forget about without there being any more excess bloodshed that night.

And then the guy noticed Sephiroth, who'd made no attempt to hide. In half a second he was alert, fully alert, and _furious_, his voice thundering with an intensity and depth of rage that seemed utterly _alien _for someone who looked that young.

Even from where he was across the clearing, he knew Sephiroth was mentally trying to catalogue this boy's face and profile from the thousands the man had been faced with. He also saw when General Sephiroth came up blank and tried instead for speech. Which apparently wasn't good enough, because every line of the stranger's body was taut with anger, rage, _something_.

And then the crazy bastard _charged_, running to meet the Masamune's steel with his Buster.

*

There were a good many things Zack had gotten used to while in a combative position in the middle of one of Shinra's wars. He'd seen a lot.

He had _never _seen anyone with the balls or hell, the utter lack of _brains_ to challenge the General like that, had never seen a man brave enough, _stupid enough_ to even _dream _of taking on the greatest warrior so far known to man and challenging him to do battle with the one weapon Sephiroth had perfected beyond what any master could possibly teach him.

He had _never_ seen anyone who could do that, _and could keep up with him_.

Zack gaped like a cadet fresh from first training as the blond wielded the Buster sword—it _had_ to be the Buster sword, he'd recognized his beauty _anywhere_—with an ease unlike anything he'd ever seen. Not even after all his training, and the new round of mako injections could _he _ever think of moving with such grace, like gravity didn't matter, like it weighed almost _nothing_. And gods, the way the two of them _fought_, leaping at each other as if it'd been choreographed.

He'd probably hit himself over the head for thinking it later, and it was probably _beyond _cheesy, but they fought like it was a dance, some great cosmic routine that they'd both known since birth and had been dying to perform until now.

It was like finding out that the General's true reason for existence was not to lead the greatest army on the Planet, but only to fight this stranger from the heavens, in a blur of silver and gold and arcs of steel and sound.

It was like they _fit_ together, like _equals_, and finding an equal to Sephiroth was like finding…

Zack couldn't think of a single simile that would fit to describe how seeing something like this could ever compare with anything else because there was _nothing_ like this.

And Sephiroth was _interested_, was _intrigued_. Zack knew this as well as if it were _him _feeling it, as he tracked the silent battle above him and watched the General putting _effort_, true effort into his attacks, as if the fighting he'd done thus far from the saddle of his chocobo was _nothing _compared to this, was nothing compared to being faced with an opponent that could keep up with him, even without reservation on his part. That he'd always been holding back, maybe even delaying the end of the war for a reason, and perhaps that reason was this.

Which was insane. Sephiroth didn't know this man, didn't understand the anger or the rage or the reason why he'd attacked any more than Zack himself did.

Why weren't any others coming? He glanced quickly over his shoulder. That blast had been _enormous_ and even on a busier night, _someone_ would have seen something, heard something, if not the entire camp. This was a camp intermingled with SOLDIERs; why was there nothing? The smell of Lifestream became even thicker as he thought it, and for a moment he wondered just _what_ the Planet was trying to hide, if in fact She really was trying to muffle the sounds of their fighting with pure magic.

A strangled "_ghhrk_" sound made him turn back so fast, he nearly gave himself whiplash as he started in shock, catching just the end of the wraparound check that the blond delivered, as quickly as if had been by reflex, with the back of the Buster sword.

It was the fact that the wraparound check had _connected_, and that Zack's sharpened ears heard the sound of ribs cracking—_ribs cracking! Sephiroth!_ Did he even _have_ crackable ribs??—just before Sephiroth was flung back with the stranger's momentum into a tree trunk. Branches snapped around him as Sephiroth plummeted to the ground, catching himself the minute he touched earth where he automatically swept his long legs into a crouch, ready to spring. Zack was far from an expert, but even from here he could see the General's eyes burning with a swordsman's delight.

_They were going to _kill_ each other!_

That thought was enough to break Zack from the spectator's position standing dumbstruck at the tree line and send him dashing in. His blade was moving in the air almost before he knew it, the low moan of it singing through the air as it bore down on the stranger in a straight vertical slash; with a blade as big as his Buster, it made for the distraction it was meant to be. Enough for the stranger to swing his beauty's twin up to block him with a shrill squeal of steel on steel.

His first clear sight of the blonde was of blue eyes that _glowed_; a more brilliant blue than anything he'd ever seen outside of the depths of a linking materia. Mako eyes; blue over blue. His first thought was, _fuck, the guy's gorgeous_.

His second was, thank gods, more structured, more relevant; _a SOLDIER, maybe a deserter?_

The blond was older than Zack had first thought; there were faint lines that Zack's sharpened eyes could barely pick out between the brows, and a deep-laid weariness in the eyes that the man's glare couldn't hide, nor the bizarrely-spiked hair, that faintly resembled his own, cover.

Those eyes widened when they locked with his, and he watched in what felt like detached fascination as the blond leapt back as if singed, the little color he had left draining from his face until he looked as white as a sheet and rather as if he'd seen a ghost.

Pushing the advantage while the stranger seemed so preoccupied, his words were a growl. "I'm not going to let you hurt the General!"

Digging the balls of his feet into the ground, he held his sword straight and level. He'd take what advantages the stranger gave him since it was obvious that in a straight fight he'd be hopelessly outclassed.

He didn't dare even look at Sephiroth, who might still be so caught up in the rush of fighting an _equal_ that he might order Zack to go. And Zack wasn't leaving the General, even if he meant him ending up dead, just to satisfy Sephiroth's desire to see who would defeat whom.

"_Zack_," murmured the blond in a broken whisper, the tip of his sword falling to the ground as if those powerfully-muscled arms had suddenly lost all their strength. "You're _Zack_."

Those glowing blue eyes whipped around to focus on Sephiroth who was standing, sword in hand and the cloud of Cure magic dissipating fast around him, his expression never belying the fact that forcing your body to re-knit itself in the span of seconds was a _painful _son-of-a-bitch to go through.

The stranger's buster sword fell, dropping from nerveless fingers as he slumped to his knees, staring, his eyes back and apparently fastened on Zack's face. "_They sent me back…_" he whispered in that barest croak of a voice. "_They really sent me back…_"

And in that moment, he looked like a lost little boy and not like some hotshot SOLDIER at all. Zack felt his heart give a painful jolt even as he jerked himself forward, hitting the stranger _hard_ in the back of his head, striking a nerve cluster. The man's body crumpled almost instantly, and slumped back down the ground in what looked like a dead faint, not very unlike how they'd originally found him.

Zack pragmatically kicked the stranger's weapon aside anyway before he spared a single startled glance at Sephiroth that spoke volumes of _shit, now what do we do?_

The carefully blank look he got in return could have meant anything, but Zack suspected Sephiroth was just as clueless as he was.

"Right… so, what does the rule book say we do in this situation, General Sephiroth sir?"

"The penalty for treason as I remember it is death."

But there was hesitation there, and _not _just because Sephiroth wanted to continue their little duel until one of them dropped dead.

"I would've recognized hair like that, sir. And the sword. And… look at him, who could forget the way he _moved_?"

"But if he's not one of our troops…"

"And there haven't been any reports back of any other renegades, have there?" Zack continued, pressing his point. "We'd have heard of him, if he were. The whole world would have known his name if he could come that close… you know, to being _you_."

"What exactly are you planning, Lieutenant?"

Zack quirked the wry little half-smile at the General's suspiciously bland tone and his use of Zack's rank as he stared down at the figure in the grass. "Thinking of pulling rank on my good ideas, sir? I just want to know more."

"…Likewise."

"If we brought him back…"

As if Sephiroth knew exactly what he'd propose, he stopped him short. "No. I won't have you endangering your life with him."

"But—"

But the guy had stopped when Zack had tried to fight him off. When he woke up… wouldn't it be better for _Zack _to be there instead of the General?

One thing you just don't let your friends do was sit up waiting on a madman who was after that friend's blood. Unless he attacked just because he hated Shinra, but even then, Sephiroth was still a far cry from the real power in Shinra.

…Ugh. There was something logical he was missing here and he didn't know what it was. Hell with it.

"So what are you going to do?"

"We should… question him."

"…Yes. Well. I was _getting_ to that part, sir, when I said we should bring him back."

"What you were getting to, Lieutenant, was _sneaking_ this stranger past several hundred soldiers of assorted rank to keep in your tent like a pet when he wakes up, am I right?"

"…Er… something like that," Zack agreed sheepishly, scratching at the back of his head, "you missed the part where I would've offered water and an assortment of cookies?"

"Lieutenant."

"Hey, I've been _meaning_ to give you one for yourself you know, but—"

"_Lieutenant._"

Zack felt something inside him deflate, "Right," he said finally, even though the smile never really left his face, "Proper conduct and respect towards a superior officer, right?"

Sephiroth hesitated, and for a moment looked truly frustrated, as if he wanted to apologize and didn't know how to. "It's not… we should report this…"

"…But you don't want to…" Zack murmured, "You know they're either going to firebomb him or haul him away or test the hell out of him and his crazy-ass reflexes or something, and you don't want that to happen."

"That should not matter."

"But it _does_, and you know it does," Zack argued. "I want answers just as much as you do, sir, but he's not going to give them to us if we clap him in irons. Hell, I doubt even if we pumped him with truth serum he'd open his mouth, not if he's anything like you."

"Your plan is ridiculous. We could never manage to pull it off."

_That_ made a strange warm feeling flutter in his chest; maybe he was actually getting somewhere because Sephiroth had said _we_, the two of them, as naturally as if that were the way things should and _would_ be. It was a good feeling.

He didn't let that stagger him for long though, "I don't know… what's one more SOLDIER trying to drown the bad stuff out through a jug or two of rotgut? You can take custody of his sword, sir, and I'll take care of _him_… nothing new about me doing a good deed and bringing some poor shit-faced comrade back to camp now, is there?"

"We are supposed to be guarding the perimeter."

"…Waiting for the next shift might not end up so good," Zack murmured, looking down at the gold hair that glistened in moon- and starlight.

"Bring him back first. Your… skills… at this sort of subterfuge are likely to be far greater than mine."

"That a nice way to call me sneaky, boss?" Zack replied ruefully, chancing the less formal title with a customary grin, "But yeah, I agree with you. Anyone hanging unconscious off _your_ shoulder would look both like a rag doll and suspicious beyond all reason if it weren't some form of cow fit for roasting on a spit."

"Then do so. I will keep his sword here and bring it back with me once the next shift goes on. I want you to watch him and make sure he is not a threat to the rest of the camp." Sephiroth's eyes were serious, more serious than Zack had ever seen them, and they'd been through what felt like some of the toughest years of the Wutain War together to put in comparison for him to be able to think something like that. "If he attacks…"

"I know, sir."

Sephiroth's mouth tightened. "I am trusting you not to get yourself killed," he said in warning, "and you know as well as I do that I don't do that often."

No. No he certainly didn't. Zack was hit with a pang of sadness for the man; everyone needed _someone _to trust in. It was followed by what felt like a little rush of happiness for the intimation that perhaps _he_ could be that one person, at least a little at a time.

"Yes sir," he replied, snapping a salute before going down to his knees next to the stranger. A fireman carry would have been the most efficient way to get the guy back to camp, but whatever cover story he dreamed up along the way probably wouldn't follow through very well if he strode in wearing the blond like a sack of potatoes over his shoulder. He draped one of those arms around his shoulder instead, steadying the blond with a hand around the slim waist as he hauled them up to their feet, swaying dangerously as he fought to get a proper hold. The guy wasn't light, that's for sure. Small—you didn't find a lot of SOLDIERs who made it with that kind of height—but muscled, and even with the gloves and wrist guards he could see that the guy had the thickened wrists of a damned practiced swordsman. Probably had the calluses to prove it too.

Tossing another salute back at the General, who'd picked up the stranger's sword in his other hand and was watching them warily as he set off, he began to shuffle back towards camp, the stranger a dead weight on his shoulders. "Better not wake up and try to raise hell," he muttered under his breath, "I've got a promise to keep to a certain silver-haired General, if you know what I mean, and I'm not letting even someone as pretty as you fuck that up."

*

It was almost an hour later—Zack had never been good with mentally keeping track of time, something that his instructors and various superiors had tried to drum into him with little success—before the blond stranger began to stir. By then Zack had brought the guy all the way back to camp and doused him with a good bit of brandy to keep up with his bullshit story of dragging a drunkard back to camp instead of leaving him for the ninjas to spear through in the morning. There'd been plenty of SOLDIERs around who probably could have noticed that the smell of alcohol wasn't thick enough for even a normal person to get drunk off of, even a normal civilian, and certainly not anyone fit to wear the SOLDIER charcoals, but nights were often entirely too self-involved anyway. No one wanted to be here. It was the beginning of the end of a war that had lasted nearly a decade already, and everyone was tired.

Zack had stumbled into his tent with a groan of relief, rubbing at the knots in his neck ruefully, "You'd better be grateful not being killed on the spot, and putting my and the _General's_ career on the line for dragging you in here. I'm going to kick your ass all the way back to whatever souped-up training ground you popped out of, and make you wish you'd never even thought of picking up a sword like my beauty if you even _think _of attacking."

When he'd received no answer, he'd resigned himself to the fact that he'd still have something of a wait. Maybe he shouldn't have hit the guy quite so hard…

Either way, he stripped off the guy's armlet that glittered with materia and several runes, stuffing it out of sight into his bedroll as a precaution. Now he only had to look out for the guy trying to break his neck. He could handle those odds. He hoped.

When the guy did wake, Zack had to hand it to him, he was quick. The eyelids fluttered once, before they snapped open, blue eyes focusing instantly on him without a trace of the disorientation that should have come after taking a blow like the one he'd dealt him. A second later Zack was on top of the guy, clamping down on the guy's wrists and struggling to hold him down while the blond thrashed beneath him. Clearly he wasn't all awake yet, just running on the most basic of instincts, and Zack just had to wait until he _did _wake up enough. But however small the guy was, he was _strong_—Zack knew he had had to be, having seen the way he'd had Sephiroth on the defensive like he had—and he was down on his back with a grunt, the guy pinning _him_ down, with a grip like warm iron… Shinra charcoals suddenly felt too thin between the two of them as the stranger's hips ground against his in the process and _those_ weren't thoughts he should be thinking at a time like _this_.

Also, struggling like _that_ brought the stranger's face an inch or two away from his, enough to bring the light dusting of pale freckles on the blond into sharp focus, as well as the faint beginnings of lines in that youngish face. Almost instantly, the guy stopped, and Zack heard the sound of a sharp inhalation.

"_Zack…_" the guy breathed, burying his nose in the side of his throat, voice thrumming in what could only be described as a _purr_.

It took a lot of nasty, _nasty_ images of Palmer-on-Heidigger action—hey, desperate times, desperate measures—to keep all the blood in his brain from flooding between his legs at the sound of that. The fact that he had very little distinction whether this was approaching dryfucking or death helped matters a little. But only by a little.

"_Really Zack…_"

He managed to keep back a groan, only by way of spouting the only other thing he could think of besides _why are there pants?_ which was, "Uh… yeah. That's me."

Hardly fitting words to say to someone whose faintest brushes of his lips against Zack's throat sent crazy fluttery feelings through the center of his chest, and hardly fitting words to say to someone who might break his neck at any given moment either.

The guy jerked his head up at the sound of his voice, and his eyes sharpened, Zack could _see_ the pupils in those blue eyes dilate as they swept across his face.

The first expression that crossed his face was of shock, and then incredulous wonder, as if the guy didn't quite believe he was really there.

And then the guy _blushed_. Hard. Like a tomato. Which somehow still managed to be ridiculously attractive, even when said tomato was topped with a shock of rumpled gold hair. "Oh shit, _Zack_. Fuck, I'm _sorry_—"

"_Unngh_," he managed in reply as the guy slid off him immediately.

The blond didn't stop until he'd retreated to the corner of the tent and seemed to realize what exactly he was in. Didn't look all that happy about being enclosed, either, thin canvas walls or no. "Where am I?"

"Uh… I brought you back to my tent. Need to conduct an interrogation."

Zack nearly flinched at just how unprofessional he sounded as he informed his 'prisoner' of this.

And it was dangerous. Who _knew_ what might set this guy off?

One corner of the guy's mouth lifted fractionally, the blush fast disappearing under the weight of something new, something altogether like resignation although Zack couldn't figure out for the life of him _why _this guy would be resigned to _anything_, considering he probably had the capacity to bodily twist Zack up into a human blitzball and punt him all the way across camp_. _"Isn't it proper Shinra military procedure to at least handcuff me?"

Well hell if the guy didn't have a sense of humor. Maybe not all impossibly good fighters grew up in one of Hojo's labs. Maybe it really was possible to be great without being born and bred that way.

And the idea of this guy cuffed and chained, and purring at him like he had been just a few seconds ago…

No. Concentrating. Focus. Zack was SOLDIER, damn it, and he would not be sidetracked by pretty.

Although being in SOLDIER certainly gave him the enhanced sense to _notice _the pretty all the more, but that wasn't the point. The point was that he had questions and he damned well wanted answers!

"I… I don't know what I can tell you."

Zack realized he'd said that last part out loud. Barely keeping himself from visibly fumbling for a reply, he came up with the obvious. "Okay… we'll start with the basics then. I'm not going to bite, I swear. Got a name to you so that I can stop calling you 'stranger'?"

The blond hesitated for a moment, and Zack almost regretted letting someone as dangerous and so damned freaking _suspicious _into his tent of all places, especially without backup. Then that weird determination was back in those big blues of the stranger's and his lips twitched upwards into a faint little half smile. "Cloud. I'm Cloud."

Something told him the blond wasn't try to lie to him. Maybe it was the way those eyes shone, and not because of the mako, but as if they were incandescently lit from somewhere in their very depths, trying gamely to answer all he could, even if there was something he was damn well determined to keep locked up. And there was also something faintly bitter about that figure with his hands clasped together and _watching _him with those eyes, as if half-hoping for something, and yet was laughing at himself for trying, for even thinking it. It was faintly unnerving, as if Zack should _know _something, should be able to get what the man expected, but he'd never _met _this guy in his life, ever, and it wasn't like he could forget a guy like _this_.

He'd stayed silent for too long, Cloud broke off eye-contact with him, and his lashes fluttered low as he stared at his hands instead; half-lidded blue framed in dark lashes, and Zack had to keep talking in order to keep from staring. "So… your eyes… were you… are you in SOLDIER?"

There was that little half smile again—yes now Zack was _sure _of the irony Cloud could not seem to really hold back from the twisting of those lips. "No. I pretended to be for a while… and hell, I believed it too. But it was all… all in my head. Someone set me straight about that, soon enough." He glanced up at Zack, pinning him with those _eyes _again, as he choked out what sounded like the most self-deprecating laugh Zack'd ever heard, "I thought I was my best friend. Dreamed up some great grand past that wasn't ever real."

Zack wanted to reach out and _touch _him, reach out and wrap his arms around him and hug the guy close as if that would be enough, as if that would make everything better. He'd often felt the same way with Sephiroth… frustrated as if all the talking in the world couldn't seem to help, and he wanted to _understand_ and be understood, as if touching would actually helpdivine the truth that he was trying to relay to the man.

But he'd never try with Sephiroth, certainly wouldn't yet when the man shied away from the least touch like it was a blow struck out against him—Zack _hurt_ to think that was the only way the man had ever been touched. And he would hardly try with this man who was still a stranger, even though he had the same eyes as the General—the kind that said he was somehow broken and quite possibly beyond repair.

"So your eyes…?"

"Not quite sure what they did to me." Cloud passed a hand in front of his eyes, grimacing. "Never wanted to go back to find out."

Zack wasn't entirely sure what the guy was talking about because it hinted of darker secrets, stuff he'd always suspected and what Sephiroth himself had sometimes hinted at, but it was something he didn't _know_. He made a mental note to tell Sephiroth that important bit because if this stranger was spilling out dark little Shinra secrets that weren't supposed to be heard by the common SOLDIER, that might mean he was one of those black marks the Turks were after. And it was never really a good idea to mess with those if one wanted to keep up a healthy aversion to bullets. The Turks caught up with _everyone_ in the end, after all.

"And your—" Zack hesitated in his attempt to change the subject before he continued boldly on, "your sword?"

"I guess you recognized it?"

"What can I say?" Zack replied, feigning carelessness in his shrug, "A beauty like that's pretty damned hard to miss. Especially when I thought I had the only one on the Planet."

Cloud let out a short bark of laughter that still somehow managed to come out slightly strangled. "You've looked it over, haven't you? Does it meet your standards?"

"It's been used, but not lately. It isn't your only sword, is it?"

"You catch on quick." Cloud slapped his pockets in an empty gesture anyway, "Don't have the others though; broke them, sold them, handed them off to the next generation of mindless killers and left the only other I kept with it back in my own… home."

Zack didn't comment on that slight pause of a hesitation, but he certainly filed it away as well. "And how do you know Sephiroth?"

Cloud's eyebrow quirked up, "Doesn't everyone?"

"Come on, don't be like that to me… what dark little secrets are you hiding?"

"I know a lot more about him than he does himself right now." Cloud gave another hollow little laugh that hurt to listen to, because whatever knowledge he had had to be downright painful to bear. And whatever it was, he was probably not going to just blurt it out to some ambitious Second Class who couldn't even hold the man down.

"Then… how do you know me?"

The blond was silent for a moment. "I sometimes think I know you better than I know myself," he answered cryptically, and refused to say any more. From the haunted look in his face, Zack didn't press. He really wasn't cut out for this interrogation business. Too nice for one, didn't want to press when the guy didn't know what to say, wasn't even sure if he was asking the damned questions properly.

And there was something _about_ that man…

Perhaps he was just royally fucked in the head, because he wanted to make things better for this guy, make that look wash away like it'd never been there. He wanted to see this man's real smile, not that faint and fractional lift of the corners of his lips. Maybe after Seph, he was just keen on adopting each and every ridiculously over-leveled killer he found.

Or perhaps it could be the curve of the man's lips, that deep clear blue of his eyes under gold lashes, and that _hair_ like a—

"Chocobo's ass."

Cloud's head jerked up, staring at him. "_What?_"

_Note to self_, Zack thought hastily to himself, _never speak without thinking when in the presence of crazed psycho killers. Very, very detrimental to health and personal safety._ But Cloud didn't look _mad_, just… startled.

"You haven't looked in a mirror lately either, have you?" Cloud muttered, cocking his head and watching him keenly as he spoke, probinghim, waiting for an answer with a look _so like Sephiroth_ when the man was trying to play Zack's game.

Zack blinked, recovering quite quickly if he did say so himself, considering he didn't know _what_ on earth Cloud was getting at. "Well what can I say? All the time roughing it out here, marching dawn and dust without a bird to take me, haven't had time to find something shiny enough to primp with. Tin mugs only go so far to help elucidate my dashing good looks."

"Big words for someone who never noticed he had hair like a hedgehog."

And_ that _made him splutter. "_Hedgehog?_"

"No?" Cloud paused, and what might have been wry laughter flickered in his eyes for a moment, and Zack wondered if the man really had a sense of humor somewhere in all that dark melancholy. "Perhaps you should ask Sephiroth if he'd like to stop prowling around this tent and come in and give his opinion on the subject. I promise I won't try to kill him." Those full lips tightened, "Yet."

"You're a reassuring person, I see. Your friends ever tell you that?"

Cloud shrugged, looking quickly down at his hands, but not before Zack had seen the twisting of his lips, and quite possibly even the faintest beginning of an unshed tear. "It's as good as I can give."

"You know he could spear you through right this very instant, don't you?" Zack wasn't entirely sure when the General had finished off his patrol and made his way back here, but someone else on his side was a hell of a good thing, especially if this Cloud could stand to play nice.

"All too well. And that's an experience I'd rather go without while unarmed, if it'll please him."

Well it wasn't exactly flowers and fluffy green chocobos kind of humor, but this guy still had Seph beat when it came to trying.

When the General appeared in the entranceway, both Zack and Cloud could see the glint of moon- and firelight on the Masamune. Cloud immediately tensed, blue eyes stony, but he didn't move, and his gloved hands were clasped together hard enough to make the weathered leather squeak in protest.

Zack was quick to intervene. "Oh no sir, we're not letting you bring that flagpole of a sword in here… place isn't big enough for the three of us and the embodiment of your ego too."

Cloud let out what sounded almost like an unwilling snort of amusement, "I'd listen to him, Sephiroth. He won't quit the euphemisms until you do."

Zack had a wounded look on his face when he returned the majority of his attention back to the blond, "Now that's just plain mean. I have nothing against his need for—"

"Proportionality?"

"—propor—" Zack stopped, frowning at the idea of being predictable. "…overcompensation."

He cast a quick glance at his superior immediately afterwards. Sephiroth was frowning at him, but he didn't look ready to cut out Zack's tongue just yet. Zack could live with that.

"Ah. Convenient answer, Zack. How long'd it take you to come up with that one?"

The corners of Cloud's lips had flickered upward again, and something about his voice told Zack the blond was being far from condescending. He was _playing_ with him, and though this was a hell of a situation to be doing that in, it didn't mean Zack didn't appreciate.

"Has Zack been able to ask you _anything_ of relevance in this apparent sham of an interrogation?" Sephiroth finally asked in a deceptively mild voice, watching the boy warily but with an interest his solemn face couldn't hide.

"He hasn't offered me baked goods yet," Cloud murmured, eyes flickering to the canvas wall of the tent as if to avoid looking at the General. "So I guess that means he still hasn't officially broken the rules."

Zack blinked at this all-too-accurate judge of his character. "How long were you out for?"

"…However long after you hit me. Not even I can take a good blow to a nerve cluster and come out singing." Cloud grimaced and rubbed the back of his head with one hand, "And I was starting to ignore it properly too."

"Er… yeah about that. Think you need a Cure?"

"Non-regulation uses are strictly forbidden in times of war," Cloud and Sephiroth both replied at once, as if they were quoting directly from the Shinra procedural manual. Which they probably were if Zack knew anything about Sephiroth.

Their eyes darted to each others' immediately after as if it'd been orchestrated and they held that look for a long moment. Cloud dropped his eyes first, looking down and away, his lips pursing in a way that Zack would probably have found irresistibly kissable if he'd come across them while ranging the bars under the Plate back in Midgar and not skulking around in a tent with a possible—hell, _probable_—fugitive from the law. Still, whatever he was, Cloud knew Shinra if he could quote the manual verbatim. And an encyclopedia had _nothing_ on Shinra's Complete and Unabridged.

"If you'd give me back my armlet," Cloud commented dryly, "I could probably do it myself."

"No."

Zack and Cloud both turned to look at Sephiroth again, who'd given a firm shake of his head. "No matter your actions at this moment, you still acted hostilely against a high-ranking officer in the Shinra army in the middle of a war, and I will not trust that all you will cast is a simple Cure on yourself."

Cloud's lip quirked up again, "You might have just said, 'no way in hell, you'd just call Odin down to spear me in the ass' and I'd have believed you then, too."

That caused Zack to blink, because it sounded suspiciously like something _he'd_ say if he were ever in a similar situation while facing the General. And wasn't in any danger of being mauled.

Clearly Cloud thought it must've been something odd for him to say too because he stopped and blinked. "Er… well, I mean it's minor, anyhow."

Zack wasn't sure, but the glance the guy shot to him was like one you'd give to your best friend when the conversation between him and a pretty girl started to flag, like someone he needed to toss the ball to and _quick_. Which was weird, because you didn't just get that kind of reflexive assumption, the kind that seemed to bypass the brain and all the thinking involved entirely, unless you were really close with them. But he could take a hint nonetheless.

"In any case, sir. He tells me his name's Cloud."

"Cloud."

Yes, sir."

"Somehow it doesn't surprise that that might be the only piece of relevant information you were able to obtain in all the time I left you with this man."

"…He also tells me he's not in SOLDIER, sir."

Cloud was watching them both, with a slight frown as if he didn't altogether understand what was going on. Which was ridiculous, because Zack was just regurgitating information he'd just given minutes before. But Zack could see how Cloud's eyes flickered from him to Sephiroth, and then back to him. There had also been surprise, Zack had noted, especially when he'd referred to his superior officer as 'sir', as if _that_ was surprising instead of anything else Zack might have addressed the General as.

One of Sephiroth's eyebrows had risen at the SOLDIER comment though, and Zack looked sharp to pay attention to how Sephiroth digested this information, taking in the mako eyes and the obvious—if somewhat battered—SOLDIER-issue charcoals the guy was wearing, anew. "I see."

Zack thought he'd done a pretty damn good rendition of a proper interrogation if that was as far as Sephiroth was going to pick up where he'd left off.

*

The next morning dawned early, although neither Zack nor Sephiroth nor Cloud had slept a wink. Zack had long since taken back his snide mental remark about the General's inability to conduct a proper investigation and interrogation and had replaced it was an equally snide mental remark about the General's goddamned _thoroughness_.

Cloud had held up pretty damned well, even if Zack still wasn't sure Cloud wasn't the enemy. Had answered all of Sephiroth's questions with a quiet frankness that certainly _sounded_ like truth, mostly because the guy didn't seem capable of lying properly even if he tried.

There were still some things Cloud had refused to tell them, even with all of General Sephiroth's solemn probing.

"Why did you attack me?"

"I thought you were someone else."

Which was patently ridiculous because if there were someone else quite like Sephiroth in the world, they'd have found them by now, wouldn't they?

…Although judging by this guy's talent, perhaps that wasn't completely out of the question.

"If you're not in SOLDIER, how did you come by those clothes?"

"He didn't need them anymore. And I did."

"Who?"

"The SOLDIER."

"No name?"

"Not anymore."

Sephiroth never looked exasperated, but something about the utter blankness of his features made Zack wonder. Apparently Cloud had picked up on it too, because the corner of his lips quirked up in a wry smile, "It's not going to work, you know. Convincing yourselves. There's no helping anyone else believing I'm anything but the bad guy."

"Then I hope you realize that it is certainly not a good thing for us to think that way of you."

There it was again. _Us_. Zack allowed himself the tiniest of smiles at that hint of inclusiveness. Seph was making progress.

"I don't know any other way."

And that… well, it really just wasn't good enough.

Zack shared a mutual look of muted dismay with his commanding officer. He was too dangerous to simply be let out, or even just to be held in containment in cuffs. Not after what they'd already seen. But if they even breathed a word to anyone higher up or even with a scientific bent…

As if to spur his mounting sense of paranoia to new and incredible heights, a voice outside chose that precise moment of silence to pipe up in a nervous, but loud, "Permission to speak to General Sephiroth, sir! The Head of Weapons Development has landed. Orders are for you to return to port to discuss the current situation."

A new recruit, obviously. But messenger boy nonetheless, and even General Sephiroth couldn't ignore a summons from the Powers that Be. Sephiroth made a sound that might almost have been a growl of impatience, as he grasped for the tent flap, glancing back pointedly at the both of them, "Do nothing whilst I am gone," he said, quiet voice heavy with warning. "Or I won't answer for what will happen to you."

Zack saluted. Cloud's face went stony, but he jerked it once in a curt nod before Sephiroth disappeared out of the tent.

Then there was silence. Again.

Well, that just wouldn't do.

"Hey, Cloud?"

"Yeah?"

"Se—the General. What'd he ever do to you?"

And oh, there was a look of avoidance right there. Total discomfort if Zack knew anything about reading a body.

"Nothing."

"Don't give me that bullshit. I saw the way you looked at him—like he… like…"

Even Zack with his exceptional imagination couldn't think of something _bad _enough to warrant all of Cloud's anger, Cloud's hatred and disgust directed at Sephiroth and Sephiroth alone. There were plenty of people even in Midgar that'd happily knife anyone who had anything to do with the company. But not Seph alone.

"He's different. Not who I was looking for."

"You telling me there are others like him?"

Cloud just watched him with eyes that tried way too hard to be empty. He was still hiding something, and Zack had half an idea it wasn't anything good.

"Not yet."

*

Why did this have to be so hard?

It took a great deal for Cloud to keep from slumping and burying his face in his hands. It should have been easy. He'd been given everything, a chance for a different future, a _better _future, one where so many things could have been avoided if only this _one man _were to…

A future where Tifa's father would be… where his _mother _and his village and… Aeris…

"Cloud?"

So why couldn't he? Why couldn't he just… make things better?

"I just… I don't know."

It _would_ be better… wouldn't it? Wasn't it worth it?

"He's a good man, Cloud."

"…I know."

That was the problem.

*

Less than four hours later, while they were still waiting for Sephiroth to come back, pandemonium came calling.

Zack wasn't entirely sure how it'd happened. Blackhurst had come running back with rifle un-slung, hell bent for leather only minutes earlier, yelling about finding the border patrolmen of their camp dead with throats neatly slit. Then the whole world had exploded into a frenzy of noise and screaming and yelling as the sharp spiking scent of magic hit his nose, seconds before the air around him exploded into flames, like someone had set off several Fire3's all at once.

He had his sword in hand in an instant, and was running his fingers in a quick check along the glowing spheres slotted into his standard-issue bracer with the other as he scanned the surroundings. "_Shit_," he muttered as he heard the shrill whine that soon changed to a keening growl. There weren't just Wutains attacking them, there was more. Monsters. Whether they were summons or were just attracted to the fighting like a lot of the monsters were around here—attracted to the blood and the death perhaps, because usually guys were more keen on killing each other than worrying about the furred and feathered while they were alive—didn't make much of a difference because now they were _attacking_ them, and Zack could see several dark splotches of filthy brown fur from his vantage point. Shit, shit, _shit_.

"Give me my things."

Cloud was behind him, and Zack wasn't sure how long he'd been there, but it couldn't have been very long because Zack didn't _freeze_ at crucial moments like this, needed all the time to figure out how to best keep his ass, and hopefully anyone else's around him, from being skewered on several feet of Wutain steel.

Zack hesitated. It could be a trap. Cloud could have been _planted_ by them, by the Wutains, and it wouldn't have been impossible, except…

"Look _out!_"

And Cloud was on top of him again, knocking him over and down, grinding him into the dirt, except this was _far_ from pleasurable as Zack felt the air threaten to leave his lungs, and Cloud leapt off him nearly as fast as he'd tackled him, dodging the wild corrective swing the dark-haired Wutain that'd sprang on them from behind aimed at his head and leaping up into the man's guard, landing a stunning blow directly to the man's throat.

Zack heard something crunch wetly, and saw the man's eyes bug as he slumped backward and crumpled to the ground in that way that only happened when you got your neck snapped. Cloud had a _look_ on his face, the kind you only ever really got after you've killed a _lot_ of people and lived to still have a heart beating inside you with something more than just blood. There was still feeling in there, in the very depths of those eyes, but the face had gone stony and silent, not all that different from Sephiroth on the battlefield.

A quick flick of the eyes later, and Cloud was leaning down, offering a hand up to Zack.

Zack took it feeling mildly foolish that the only real reason he did was because Cloud was offering contact, and he damn well wanted to take it, even at a time like this. He didn't even think too hard on the instant suspicion that maybe Cloud just wanted to break his arm in six places. If that wasn't trust, he didn't know what was.

Cloud hauled him up with relative ease, his eyes never stopped moving around him, scanning his surroundings, and Zack could've sworn that if the guy had had ears like a cat, they'd have been twitching here and there at the slightest noise, so intently was he _listening_. "Damn it Zack," he muttered, "Give me my things and at the very least I can watch your ass _properly_."

"Won't that distract you?" Zack replied with an attempt at a leer, stalling in the only way he knew how as he wracked his mind for a good answer. _Should_ he? The General still hadn't been sure whether or not this guy was safe—no, not safe, no matter what Cloud was, he would never really be _safe_, not with the way he fought—on their side. And now with this attack…

"_Zack_."

So damn it, why did he trust him?

_Gah_.

"I don't have your sword, Cloud. Sephiroth kept that. Your armlet though…" he snatched it out of his belt-satchel, and handed it to him. "Don't you dare end up a traitor, Cloud." He said, with a warning glare, "I'll come back and haunt you, I swear. I'll be damned _cranky_ if I die."

Something flickered in those eyes as Cloud methodically checked his materia quickly, secured it around one wrist, and snatched up the dead man's sword—to hell with battlefield superstition anyway, not when things were desperate. "That's what I'm trying to avoid. Where's Sephiroth?"

Zack jerked his head towards the tree line, where the thickest of the fighting was. "Up at the front."

"Then we're damn well going after him, aren't we?" Cloud murmured, scraping up an abandoned helmet from the dirt nearby, standard Shinra issue that obscured most of his face from sight when he put it on.

"What'd I say about not being a traitor, Cloud?"

"The man's going to need backup, isn't he? No in-fighting until all this is settled. Honor-sworn." Cloud replied as the two of them took off running, easily keeping up with one another in a way Zack could tell Cloud was unused to. Obviously if Cloud had traveled with people, it certainly hadn't been with any SOLDIERs, or any fighters of his caliber.

"Witnessed. Don't forget it."

As they waded into the crush of things, Zack was a little surprised to find out that Cloud knew how to fight in proper formation—the guy had already seemed to know the rule book, sure, but it was one thing to know what you were supposed to do, and another to actually know to how to do it when you were actually _there_.

Whatever kind of vigilante assassin tactics Cloud knew and practiced, there was still an obvious military base somewhere in all that training as well.

*

There were no fancy leaps and feints from Cloud this time; this was steady on-the-ground footwork as the two of them slowly advanced through the crush of the fighting. Zack had never really had anyone near him that darted past the dropped rifles with a baleful look like Cloud did, how he didn't seem to notice the bullets flying through the air that he dodged with almost _bored_ nonchalance. Except it wasn't nonchalance because even if most of Zack's observations were conducted out of the corner of his eye, he could see immediately that the guy noticed _everything_ and it was only a single-minded goal running through his brain that wasn't the _where am I, who else is around me, are they enemies, can I take them?_ which was quite obviously _need to get to Sephiroth_.

_Why _Cloud was so damned eager to get to Sephiroth Zack had no idea, and there was still enough suspicion left to him about this guy that forced him to keep up with the blond, forced him to keep at his back.

Zack hadn't had a lot of time to look over the collection of materia Cloud had kept slotted into his Dragon Armlet, but of the mixture of greens, blues and reds, he'd only really been able to recognize FullCure out of the greens, and it was a mastered one at that. He'd only ever seen _one_ of those and _that_ was one that belonged to Sephiroth who didn't carry it often for the power it required to use it. Clearly Cloud had been ready to fight something _big _when they'd found him. The other two greens were spells, of that much he was sure, and they were high-level ones at that. There was an All material there, attached to the FullCure. Clearly, despite his automatic surliness and the fact that they'd found him alone, Cloud was used to traveling in a party with at least one or more people in order to make that near-mastered All materia worthwhile.

The next one told Zack that despite the use Cloud's FullCure materia had taken, the man was no mere Cure bitch. It was a purple… Zack could recognize _that_, he'd trained with that one himself; Counterattack. Obviously a heavy hitter in the party, Cloud was. Zack wasn't surprised to note this. Just look at the size of that sword after all.

But… spells, strength, _and_ a healer? Whatever he was, Cloud obviously didn't trust anyone but himself to keep himself and the people around him alive. Which was… sad, really. Not something to be mocked, just… people should have other people to depend on when things got bad, and even if things _didn't_.

The last was a red, and Zack had no idea _what _kind of Summon Cloud would carry around with him, but just a glance at the others made it pretty damn sure that whatever kind of Summon it was, Zack could be sure the thing would pack a pretty big punch.

He could see Cloud glance at his bracer glittering with green, before he looked around and un-slotted two of the greens, replacing the one linked to the All. Probably an attack spell of some form.

He saw Cloud glance at it once while they jammed their way through before visibly deciding against it; probably too many targets that were interspersed with their own. Zack decided it was probably a good thing that whatever else, Cloud appeared to be on _their_ side, if only for the fact that he ruthlessly cut down the Wutains that surged up against him shrilling their war cries, and never once touched a Shinra soldier, except once to jerk one out of the way of a spray of bullets that would have gone straight through the boy's brain.

General Sephiroth up ahead was not mounted, though Adrammelech was right at his master's side, his warning whistle shrill as his fought as hard as the man beside him, looking ferocious as only a war bird could, with blood streaking beak and talons. General Sephiroth was a blur of motion; black leather and the reflection off of plate armor, his sword a thin ribbon of silver and death. He was holding his own, but he was also _alone_, at the very front with his war bird, just like a true General should, and everyone who had eyes could see that _he_ was the target they were after. Zack could understand Cloud's haste to get there, if what he wanted was to protect the General… but this was still the guy who'd tried to _kill_ General Sephiroth not all that many hours ago. Was he trying to _protect_ him?

Perhaps it was that fighter's instinct again—on Cloud's part, just like it had been on Sephiroth's before. He hadn't wanted to reveal Cloud to the others, hadn't wanted to report him because he'd been intrigued by the guy, been intrigued by the extent of his strength, with the possibility that he might have met his equal. Sephiroth was proud—he would never allow himself to die exceptat the hands of the best opponent, and whatever he was, Cloud would not be a disappointment if it came time to putting up a good fight. Maybe Cloud wanted the same thing. Although Zack wasn't so stupid as to that it was as simple as all _that_.

Whatever the case, Zack hoped that Cloud's homicidal tendencies towards the General wouldn't resurface until a good while _after _the day's fighting was done.

They eventually managed to fight their way through to the General, taking up position behind him so that they were an odd ragged circle of swords and sharp chocobo talons. And the General looked shocked—as shocked as General Sephiroth could look, anyhow—his eyes passing over Zack and raking over the stranger in SOLDIER charcoals but a regular trooper's helmet over his head. Didn't take more than an instant to figure it out though, hotshot General that he was, and he caught Zack's desperate eye with a gauging look of _are you sure?_

As Cloud met the next wave of Wutains with a clash of steel with an expression as coldly serious as his own, Sephiroth obviously realized that whatever quarrel Cloud had with him, it was clearly going to wait until _after_ the day's fighting was settled.

"How many of them do you think there are?" Zack yelled from a few feet away as his blade flashed out; a low groan of sound through the air, before ending in the solid _thwuck_ of steel in flesh, muscle and bone. And the screaming… oh hell, always the _screaming_…

"A good deal more than I expected," Sephiroth admitted, blood spattering his cheek as several men fell away from him, dead before they struck the earth again. "I had not expected the monsters—"

Adrammelech's shrill warning whistle interrupted him, and from the corner of his eye, Zack saw Sephiroth's eyes narrow, focusing on the men approaching with swords and materia-glows alike. Then they were all moving again, and Zack's attention was engaged in the blows that landed unerringly on either steel or flesh as the next wave broke over them.

He didn't know how much time had passed before he heard a ringing crack and Cloud's curse as he stumbled backwards a step, the hilt and about half of the stolen blade still held in his hand. It was enough for a side-sweeping blow to slice open his opponent's throat, gouts of blood splashing onto the little that was visible of his face as the other man dropped.

Cloud shuddered, once, before he shook his head. "_Enough_," Zack could see his mouth say, though the ringing of steel was all he could hear.

"What are you doing?" Sephiroth demanded when he saw Cloud thrust what was left of his stolen sword into the ground. Zack automatically moved in, positioned himself in front of him, covering him, as Cloud answered, "I'm going to find out how strong they are."

Zack saw a glimpse of his face; saw that the blue eyes had gone flinty and cold, as if the guy's heart had detached itself from the actions of his body. He turned his attention away, guarding him as he felt rather than saw the glowing nimbus of green power that Cloud raised, running in waves along his back. He knew without looking that the power Cloud called had made the materia-blue glow in his eyes flare even brighter, knew that if he turned around now, the glow would have swallowed Cloud's pupil, two circles of blue behind the wash of green, coiled in an afterglow of an All's blue.

A wide sweeping gesture of Cloud's arms at the corner of his eye told him the blond was sighting his targets, eyes sweeping along the faces of those he was going to attack.

And then…

And then the power exploded… _black_.

Zack felt the terror race up his spine as he stopped moving and whirled around to _stare_, forgetting training, forgetting the fact that there were people with large sharp objects that could be shoved into his person at any time… because those around them had _stopped_, gripped by the same undeniable terror that nearly drove him to his knees as a dark, sickly figure appeared directly above them, and the sounds of cold laughter filtered through the air.

If that was a summon, he'd never seen it before, never even _heard _of it before. Nothing like this had ever been mentioned in the Shinra texts about materia—and something like this, to call down the Grim Reaper itself…

The wave of magic smashed into them all and _through_ them all; Zack could feel it as if it were a cold, icy wind that chilled him to his very bones before it passed and rolled onwards.

Over thirty men fell dead instantly, slumped sightlessly to the ground like puppets with cut strings, without a struggle, without anything as that grim laughter tolled from above and the blackness of the figure faded into nothingness again.

There was a long, horrible silence where they all stared at Cloud's masked figure like he was a demon sent from the depths of hell itself. Then as one, they all turned and _ran_.

In all three years of Zack's time in the war, he had never, _never_ even a single Wutain turn tail on him, not even when Sephiroth had unleashed his worst summons on them. And here… here was a _horde_ of them, running from Cloud as if their very lives depended on it. What _was_ he?

And had they actually sided with a true demon?

Zack had never really wanted to be a priest; there were way too many rules and too many complications like vows and probably the whole not-swearing part, and that whole business where he couldn't have sex… oh, and that whole _faith_ business that he'd never really had in something that he couldn't see, couldn't feel for himself.

But right then, he almost wished he knew something of what the old man in the pulpit seemed to know. Find out if death gods or demons really roamed the Planet. That seemed like some pretty handy knowledge to have right about now.

*

Cloud's hands dropped down to his sides as the power haze cleared… the guy hadn't even broken out in a sweat after that… whatever that was… and was watching them run, the icy expression fading slowly into one of surprise. He turned to Zack with a look that might have been confusion, "Haven't they ever seen a Destruct materia before?"

Zack's reply was a dumbstruck silence. Sephiroth's quiet, "No… no they probably haven't." seemed to impress on Cloud the fact that everyone was silent, and everyone was staring.

At him. In awe, and what approached utter terror.

"Uh…"

This close, even with the visor, Zack could see Cloud's eyes had gone wide and panicked as he surveyed the crowds staring almost unblinkingly at him, and wracked his brain for some way to help him.

A second later, Cloud did it himself; he straightened, drawing himself up until he reached his full height—although next to Sephiroth, that wasn't as impressive a figure as he could've been—and in a voice pitched to carry, he thrust his fist in the air and bellowed, "_Victory!_"

…What?

He could see that knowledge playing along the faces of those soldiers around them. Victory? They had run, the Wutains had run and…

"_VICTORY!_"

And Zack was shocked to find he was thrusting his fist up alongside Cloud. Him and _Sephiroth_ and dozens of the soldiers closest to them. This was power. This was winning beyond any argument. This was true

"_**VICTORY!**_"

*

SO LONG. Oh my god, I actually can't believe how long it's taken me to come out with this chapter. But it's a long one, if that makes it any better, and I'm actually almost done another chapter after this. Now after _that_ one, I can't be 100% certain how much I have in order to amass into proper chapter story format. We'll have to see.

In any case, I've been so unsure of the flow of this chapter. A lot of it is supposed to be a little garbled and confusing, because, well, we all know Cloud's nothing if not a little jumbled up in the brains. But it's been so long staring at the same thing, me and the few people interested enough to half-heartedly beta for me, that it's all starting to blur into a "yeah, sounds good" sort of state.

Anyway. Hope you guys like. Much love for you guys who still follow this story from... however long ago now it was since I started it. You're the best!


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